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.
The Crocodile opens with Emilie de Ravin’s Belle having a nightmare about Robert Carlyle’s Rumplestiltskin. She wakes up relieved that it’s not real but then… Read More »PHOTO RECAP: ONCE UPON A TIME’s Storybrooke Scenes for 2×04 The Crocodile
Updated March 21st, 2013, the night 1×07 Out of the Past aired.
I only saw Louis Ferreira’s Col. Young once on location for Stargate Universe (SGU), so I didn’t recognize Ferreira on a wet Friday night more than a week ago as Vancouver detective Oscar Vega for midseason CTV series Motive. I should have known from Kristin Lehman’s laughter who her detective partner is. Ferreira is known for serious, dramatic and sometimes psychotic roles but is a crazy, wild, hilarious cutup of a guy out of character.
Motive filmed its crime scene in the rain at the corner of Howe and Nelson in the Ash Market with prop Metro Police cars flashing (not with actual Vancouver Police decals like Continuum uses). The show’s twist is to reveal the killer at the start of each episode and then let us follow along the detectives’ efforts to solve the murder and uncover the reasons behind it.
Kristin Lehman from The Killing is the lead as “feisty female Vancouver detective” Angie Flynn, a divorced, single Mom solving murders on a series populated with other Canadian actors. In fact, Peter Kelamis just tweeted he has been cast as a guest actor so we can look forward to an SGU Brody-Col. Young reunion on screen sometime in 2013.
Read More »Kristin Lehman and Louis Ferreira Film CTV’s MOTIVE in Downtown Vancouver for 1×07 – Updated
Inspired by a popular Dutch TV show, midseason ABC series Red Widow is about a San Francisco mobster’s widow, Marta Walraven, forced to replace her husband as head of a crime syndicate after his murder. She does this to protect her three children, two of whom were in a scene with her at the Terminal City Ironworks compound in east Vancouver yesterday. The eldest son Gabriel ( Sterling Beaumon) called down to his mother Marta (Radha Mitchell) and younger brother Boris (Jakob Salvati) from the roof of one of the buildings dressed as Keller’s Hardware.
It appeared to be the last exterior scene before production moved inside the compound for a long night shoot.
Read More »SHOOT: RED WIDOW & Sons Film at Terminal City Ironworks Compound in East Vancouver
Published October 19, 2012 on Vancouver is Awesome.
It’s not often in this series that I get an opportunity to talk about movies where Vancouver plays itself, but once a year several locally-filmed features are screened at the Vancouver International Film Festival. This year I got to see director Katrin Bowen’s sold-out Vancouver film Random Acts of Romance on my third try last Friday night.
“Sex, Abduction, Stalking and You Thought Romance Was Dead” is the tagline. The film opens in east Vancouver’s Waldorf Hotel with our two married couples out for the evening: Amanda Tapping’s Dianne married to Zak Santiago’s younger man Matt and Laura Bertram’s young wife Holly married to Robert Moloney’s David. Elsewhere in the restaurant is Ted Whittall’s single sleezeball Richard, breaking up with his latest conquest. Add Sonja Bennett’s single, completely wacko stalker Lynne and Katharine Isabelle’s lesbian Bud to this mix of interconnected Vancouverites and you get random acts of violent romance.
At last Friday’s screening, the very tall Katrin Bowen (below) spoke about the importance of setting her movie in Vancouver in all its “rain, sex and awkwardness.” She wanted the city to “take on a personna”. It helps that 95% of the movie soundtrack is music from Vancouver indie bands, many discovered at the Biltmore and Cobalt Hotels. And that there are so many scenes set in recognizable locations like the denouement of an abduction under the south end of the Burrard Bridge.
But the big question for the director last Friday was: how did you get Vancouver’s Sci-fii Queen Amanda Tapping to star in your movie? It turns out Katrin Bowen and Tapping became fast-friends years ago when Bowen worked as Tapping’s photo double/standin on the first Stargate TV series, Stargate SG-1. Read More »VIFF: Vancouver as Vancouver in RANDOM ACTS OF ROMANCE
Fringe crew set up for filming on the Vancouver Art Gallery’s north plaza last night in a torrential downpour and then filmed scenes in slightly less of a deluge. The last hours of filming for the final season’s eighth episode turned out to be one wet slog. Background women were allowed to keep their umbrellas for the scenes to protect their hair and 1940s garb but background Observers had nothing but their fedora hats to keep them dry during a take. [Update: POlivia filmed highly emotional scenes on the roof under a scrim of Anna Torv’s Olivia convincing Joshua Jackson’s Peter Bishop to take the Observer tech out of his head.]
Earlier in the day, Joshua Jackson’s Peter and Michael Kopsa’s Captain Windmark were spotted heading to set inside CBC Vancouver [where they filmed a stunt fight in empty office space on the east side] but rain-drenched fans only observed Kopsas’s Windmark at the night shoot when I was there.
Read More »SHOOT: FRINGE’s POlivia on the Vancouver Art Gallery Roof in a Rainstorm for 5×08 – Updated
Midseason ABC series Red Widow — about San Francisco widow Marta Walraven forced to replace her mobster husband as head of a crime syndicate after his murder — filmed at its regular location in Lana Lou’s restaurant dressed as Cafe Rossiya in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside today. Australian Radha Mitchell, who stars as the widow, stayed inside the restaurant along with Erin Moriarty as her daughter Natalie, Luke Goss (Hellboy II) as bodyguard Luther and Lee Tergesen (Oz) as mob foot soldier Steven Tomlin in the morning scenes.
After those wrapped, a Red Widow steadycam crew filmed an exterior scene of Wil Traval (someone I haven’t seen on set before) as Irwin Lazarev [talking to Erin Cahill’s character and then] walking to his car.
Read More »SHOOT: RED WIDOW at its Russian Mob Restaurant in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside – Updated
A donkey interrupted a Once Upon a Time take at this village set below located on the shore of Deer Lake in Burnaby. It’s meant to… Read More »SET: ONCE UPON A TIME’s Island Haven in Present-Day Fairytale Land Destroyed in 2×05 – Updated
Published October 11, 2012 on Vancouver is Awesome
Being Bad Never Looked So Good. Last night’s series premiere of Vancouver (and Victoria)-shot Arrow broke records with four million viewers and bragging rights as the biggest show on the American network The CW in three years.
Loosely-based on DC Comics The Green Arrow, the TV series Arrow is less Smallville-ish and more like The Dark Knight trilogy’s re-imagined Batman. The story: missing and thought dead for five years after a shipwreck, Stephen Amell’s billionaire playboy Oliver Queen returns home a changed man. He secretly creates the persona of vigilante Arrow to fight crime and corruption in Starling City with martial arts and technology plus the special skill of archery.
By day, Oliver Queen continues to play the part of the billionaire cad he used to be, while trying to make amends with those he wronged, like his former girlfriend Dinah “Laurel” Lance, who works for a legal aid group called CNRI (Canary!). But she’s having none of it. “I didn’t grieve. I was too angry,” Katie Cassidy’s Lance tells Amell’s Queen Read More »BIG READ: Hooded-Vigilante Series ARROW’s Record-Breaking Premiere
