Skip to content

Susan Gittins

Longtime mainstream media (MSM) journalist and author Susan Gittins began writing about and photographing Vancouver’s many film and TV location shoots in the summer of 2010 after the Winter Olympics put the city and its beauty on the world stage. Movies and TV series often showcase the Vancouver area in similar fashion. Vancouver is Awesome commissioned her YVRShoots series in the fall of 2010 and it ran regularly for three years. She launched her own daily YVRShoots blog in the spring of 2012.

A Fond Farewell to Homegrown SANCTUARY – Updated

Syfy’s official cancellation today of our own little sci-fi success story Sanctuary marks the end of an era in Vancouver. For the first time in a decade, American cable network Syfy (formerly Sci-Fi) doesn’t have a single TV series filming here. They began with the sixth season of Stargate SG-1, then Stargate Atlantis, Battlestar Galactica, mini-series Tin Man and Alice, Caprica, Stargate Universe, pilot Blood and Chrome, Eureka and Sanctuary, which both wrapped filming here last summer.

Until today there was a sliver of hope for a Sanctuary renewal even though the series, co-created by Stargate star Amanda Tapping, Stargate director Martin Wood and Stargate writer Damian Kindler, had to give up its Burnaby studio and even sell sets while it waited for a decision. Finally it came this afternoon: Sanctuary would not be returning for a fifth season, making last year’s fourth season its final one.

Read More »A Fond Farewell to Homegrown SANCTUARY – Updated

PRIMEVAL: NEW WORLD 1×8 Dinosaur Chases Jogger in the Olympic Village – Updated

In the upcoming Vancouver-as-Vancouver series Primeval: New World, primeval creatures enter our city through temporal anomolies, aka time portals, and terrorize our neighbourhoods. One such dinosaur suddenly appeared in the Olympic Village last Thursday, chasing a jogger east from the Olympic Village pedestrian bridge to the Creekside Community Centre in take after take. It was a treat to watch the guy-in-the-grey-skin-suit-carrying-a-sphere (Chuck Campbell) who will become the computer-generated-dinosaur (an Albertosauras) following this actor-jogger until the jogger suddenly stops, looks behind him, yells “Holy Shit” and leaps over a bench to try to get away. Now that’s acting. I have a feeling he doesn’t make it since the last scene of the day was a crime scene behind the green Dragon Boat portable trailers.

Read More »PRIMEVAL: NEW WORLD 1×8 Dinosaur Chases Jogger in the Olympic Village – Updated

Welcome Back Baby – Look What Returns for Supernatural’s Season Seven Finale – Updated

Supernatural has been tough on the Winchester brothers and their fans in season seven, taking away so much of what they love — starting with angel-turned-God Castiel (Misha Collins) in the second episode and then Bobby (Jim Beaver) before Christmas in the heart-breaking episode ten, where the fatally-shot father figure comes out of a coma briefly for a final few moments with his beloved “idjits”. Gradually though, these loved ones are returning, albeit in different forms. Castiel is back but sadly and hilariously cuckoo-bananas after too long in the cage with Lucifer. And Bobby is back but as a ghost and a potentially vengeful one at that.

So that leaves Dean’s beloved black Impala unaccounted for, missing since Halloween when two Leviathans took on the forms of Sam and Dean to drive acoss the country in their own black Impala staging a series of public mass killings in the appropriately-titled episode six, Slash Fiction.

Ever since the Impala went into hiding, I have been looking for it each time I found Supernatural filming on location, scouting the area only to discover yet another in the series of not-the-Impalas. I did enjoy the SMD license plate on the chocolate crap-car-of-the-week though. That was a nice touch.

And let’s not forget the bright orange monstrosity driven in last Friday’s There Will Be Blood.

But enough is enough. Producers assured Jensen Ackles that the Impala would be back and it seems they saved the best for last. At a season finale shoot a month ago, not far from the Supernatural studios, look what I found parked on the road.

It was one of three Impalas on set that day. Further down the road at the Nokia head office dressed as Dick Roman’s latest acquisition Sucrocorp, the second Impala Read More »Welcome Back Baby – Look What Returns for Supernatural’s Season Seven Finale – Updated

BIG READ: SEVENTH SON Films on its Mega Medieval Castle Set

Published May 11, 2012 on Vancouver is Awesome

After months of construction, dark fantasy movie Seventh Son started filming this week on its gigantic castle set on the gravel field at Boundary and Kent in Vancouver, known as the Kent Hangar field. A set so big that @tessacpliu tweeted on a drive-by: “Holy! HUGE production #SeventhSon bus drove by to see the whole sizzle! Wow! Blue screen too! #yvrshoots.”

In addition to the vast wooden set, I counted eight generators, several giant blue screens attached to a wall of forty-two stacked shipping containers on the north side (crew had turned one of the bottom containers into a makeshift props department) and several more giant blue screens attached to a smaller wall of stacked shipping containers on the south side. Crew park, tents, craft services for background performers both human and equine, trailers, trucks and a large steel tank took up most of the remaining space.

Unfortunately, I could only a see a sliver of the filming on Monday afternoon through a gap in the blue screens, revealing an interior market with background performers dressed in medieval garb and real horses tethered to wood railings. Main cast must have been on set, judging by the waiting “star cars”, but the actors were being driven to and from their trailers in the southeast corner of Kent Hangar field to the north entrance to the castle set unseen.

Read More »BIG READ: SEVENTH SON Films on its Mega Medieval Castle Set

Hunt for Holder on THE KILLING – Recap of Days 20 & 21

Poor Holder. He so wants to be good at something. Football. Breakdancing. Turns out he’s a good cop but there’s not much reward in that on The Killing.

Last week we discovered that the person shadowing our detective duo Linden & Holder is none other than Wapi Eagle Casino security chief Roberta Drays. A rattled Linden seeks refuge for her and her son Jack at Holder’s apartment, where he cooks them some breakfast burritos and Linden finds a lead that takes her to the Wapi Indian Reservation on Day 20 of the investigation. She tells Holder to check out the Wapi Eagle casino. Uh-oh. That spells trouble.

Linden has a run-in on the reservation, some of which was filmed on Tsleil Waututh Nation land in North Vancouver, with Wapi Casino Chief Nicole Jackson who tells her, “Anything can happen on this land, detective. You’ve been warned.” Jackson and her two thugs escort her off . Holder, meantime, is chatting up a blackjack dealer and female and male hookers in the casino and making himself all kinds of conspicuous trying to get access to the mysterious under-construction 10th floor. Tribal police greet him at the elevator and handcuff him even though he tells them he’s a cop. “Not here you ain’t,” one says. They take him to a remote spot in the woods where Jackson and Drays are waiting. Jackson then calls Linden on Holder’s phone and holds it up so she can hear the Wapi thugs kicking and beating her partner while he screams.

Last night’s episode opened with Linden desperate to find Holder. She requests a police search team but is told it has to go up the chain of command. She takes her son Jack back to Holder’s apartment where she gets a call saying Lt. Carlson nixed the search party. Linden leaves Jack and storms into Carlson’s office, shouting at him about how bad it will look when Internal Affairs find out he did nothing while a cop died “out in the field”.

Linden returns to the reservation, encountering a road block in the dark. “Seattle police don’t have jurisdiction here,” casino security chief Drays says. But Carlson has taken heed of Linden’s warning and shows up with a search team telling Linden they have until dawn.

Officers find Holder’s Pez dispenser near a dump, which they search in the daylight hours of Day 21 of the investigation. That fake dump was set up on a field in Tynehead Park in Surrey in late February. I watched Mireille Enos as Linden and the police extras turn over fake garbage with a Seattle fan who’d driven up that morning to see some Vancouver filming of her show.

A little girl points and Linden looks around up at the woods. The team runs up the hill in Tynehead Park to a bigger field where they’d filmed earlier in the day. There the search dogs find a bloodied and beaten Holder lying at the foot of a tree.

Read More »Hunt for Holder on THE KILLING – Recap of Days 20 & 21

SHOOT: FAIRLY LEGAL’s Judge Nicastro Ain’t Riding With Us!

Last Friday night’s Fairly Legal episode on USA Network featured this wonderful scene of Gerald McRaney as Judge Nicastro and Sarah Shahi as Kate Reed fighting their way through transit workers extras after a contract dispute goes array, filmed at the south side of the Vancouver Art Gallery (a former courthouse) on a sunny afternoon in mid-February. As you can see, Judge Nicastro loses his temper and punches a protester near the bottom. And they did it all over again in take after take, with Shahi really getting into it. Between camera setups, the protester extras lounged in the sun with their signs, an odd sight for passersby who did double takes, wondering if this was yet another real protest in Vancouver.

Meatloaf, aka Martin Oday, played the union’s leader Charles McKay and he may have been on set at the Vancouver Art Gallery but I don’t think I photographed him. A pity. I’d love to have seen him.

We’ll have to wait several weeks to see this episode, Kiss me Kate, broadcast on Showcase in Canada.

Read More »SHOOT: FAIRLY LEGAL’s Judge Nicastro Ain’t Riding With Us!