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BIG READ: Vancouver Productions Working the Comic-Con Craziness

Published July 9th, 2012 on Vancouver is Awesome

How’s this for Comic-Con craziness? Comic-Con tweeted Twilight fans today asking them not to start lining up outside the San Diego Convention Center three days before the convention starts on Thursday like they did last year. The anual geekfest doesn’t want them to erect another Camp Twilight tent city either. Any Twihard or TwiMom who tries to line up earlier than tomorrow or brings more than a chair and a sleeping bag with them, risks not being among the six thousand-plus lucky enough to get into the final vampires & werewolves panel at lunchtime on Thursday. If asked to leave, they’ll miss seeing exclusive footage from the mainly Vancouver-shot The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn 2 and celebrity trio Kristin Stewart, Robert Pattison and Taylor Lautner in person. Organizers have scheduled the final Twilight movie as the first official panel in marquee Hall H so that Twilight teens and their Moms can’t ruin Comic-Con like they have in the past.

[Update: A Twilight fan who’d been camping outside the San Diego Convention Center since Sunday was struck and killed by an SUV on Tuesday morning while rushing to cross the street to get back to the lineup which Comic-Con organizers were moving. Fellow fans are trying to organize a moment of silence in her honour during the Breaking Dawn 2 panel.]

Once the Twihards have gone home, Comic-Con is free to fly its geek flag until Sunday night, epitomized by what could be 2012’s hottest panel — the 10th Anniversary reunion of the cast (and creator) of space western Firefly, featuring Canada’s own browncoat Nathan “Captain Tightpants” Fillion. Is cult TV once again dominating big budget movies at Comic-Con with Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead and The Big Bang Theory panels all in high demand too?

Maybe, maybe not. Iron Man 3 is a hot ticket, as are the Warner Bros./Legendary Pictures and Sony Pictures panels in Hall H. Who doesn’t want to see footage from The Hobbit, which just wrapped filming in New Zealand? Or get a first look at two other mainly Vancouver-shot movies: the upcoming Superman reboot Man of Steel starring Henry Cavill (seen below filming a shirtless green screen rescue scene in North Vancouver) as part of the Warner Bros. panel on Saturday afternoon and mysterious space station movie Elysium starring Matt Damon (link to first official photo) and Jody Foster as part of the Sony panel on Friday afternoon. Vancouver director Neill Blomkamp will be on hand with his stars to answer questions about the followup to his Oscar-nominated first feature District 9. It turns out Elysium is the name of a vast space station constructed by a company called Armadyne where the very rich live in the year 2159  (want-ads for Armadyne  popped up at last year’s Comic-Con, the start of a viral campaign for the movie). The rest of us –- the 99% if you will — live on the over-populated, ruined planet Earth below. A bald, buff  Damon is Max, who goes up against Foster as hard-line government official Minister Delacourt [corrected], who will stop at nothing to enforce anti-immigration laws and preserve the grandious lifestyle of the citizens of Elysium in space (the mansion set below on Kent Hangar field could be on the space station).

Read More »BIG READ: Vancouver Productions Working the Comic-Con Craziness

Matt Davis Has Wrapped Filming TV Pilot CULT in Vancouver

Matt Davis took time out of playing history teacher/guardian Alaric on The CW’s hit show The Vampire Diaries to film the pilot Cult in Vancouver in March. Even for a pilot, it was a relatively-short nine day shoot, which wrapped last Thursday night so that Davis could be back in Mystic Falls on the Atlanta set of The Vampire Diaries by Friday.

In this meta pilot, Matt Davis is a blogger named Jeff investigating the rabid fans of a cult horror TV show who have taken the series too literally. But relax, TVD fans. Even if picked up, Cult will be a short, 13-episode series, leaving room for Davis to return to Vampire Diaries. In other words, this pilot doesn’t mean the death of Alaric. Although it might.

I found Matt Davis — looking far too fine for a typical blogger — filming a scene on the pilot’s first day of shooting, March 20th, in Victory Square in downtown Vancouver.

From Victory Square in the morning, Cult moved production that afternoon into an empty heritage bank building with a glorious stained-glass ceiling on Pender Street, the same building that Supernatural turned into a vampire nest.

After this downtown sighting, Matt Davis fans looked for him on location but couldn’t find him. Some had better luck tracking him out and about enjoying Vancouver, which he tweeted about falling in love with –“Dear Vancouver, In spite of your rain, I think I may love you…. The only thing missing here is my Vampire Diaries family.” He then demanded that The Vampire Diaries return to the city where it shot its pilot — “#ByThePowerOfGreySkull!!!!!! I command the CW to move TVD back to Vancouver!!!!” And later Davis reunited with David Anders and Sara Canning here (Anders was in town guest-starring on Once Upon a Time and Canning is the lead of a new series Primeval: New World).

I didn’t find Cult again on location until its last day of filming, March 29th, when crew shot some scenes of Matt Davis sitting at the bar and at the window of the Alibi Room in Gastown. A film notice suggested that the last scene Read More »Matt Davis Has Wrapped Filming TV Pilot CULT in Vancouver

Mamie Gummer of TV Pilot Emily Owens, M.D. (formerly First Cut) at University of British Columbia

Students at the University of British Columbia did a double take last Friday entering their Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, which had suddenly been renamed Denver Memorial Hospital in preparation for Saturday’s shoot. It featured Mamie Gummer (Meryl Streep’s daughter) filming some scenes for The CW’s hospital drama pilot Emily Owens, M.D. (formerly First Cut).

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BIG READ: Tribute to Axed Series as New TV Season Begins

Published July 7, 2011 on Vancouver is Awesome

Filming of the American network Fall TV season got underway this week around North America. Here in Vancouver, Supernatural star Jensen Ackles began directing a season seven episode of the Friday night show. And crew of the other locally-filmed Friday-night-hit Fringe prepped for the start of filming season four next Thursday: scouting locations and rebuilding sets in studio. So this seems an appropriate time to pay tribute to the Vancouver-shot network series not returning to our TV screens in 2011-12.

Sci-fi series V, cancelled in June after two seasons on ABC, couldn’t have been a better series to watch filming here. I will miss it most of all the axed series for its many downtown shoots and couldn’t-be-nicer-to-the-public cast led by its lead actor Elizabeth Mitchell. On the same day last summer that I photographed Mitchell (below) as FBI agent Erica Evans filming at the Vancouver Art Gallery, a photo from an office tower above of dozens of V dead-body extras lying on the grass at Portal Park made the cover of one of our local commuter papers. It took me a couple of months to find her evil counterpart V Queen Anna, played by Morena Baccarin, outside of her studio spaceship and back on location. Last September, V series took over the atrium of the Vancouver Public Library for two full nights to film scenes of Baccarin, Mitchell and other cast members at a black-tie function (below) with a greenscreen wooden spaceship platform erected outside on the south plaza.

CBC Vancouver might miss V even more than me, since the series regularly rented a CBC studio for filming, put one of its V Ambassador Centres in a CBC outdoor corridor and filmed part of its series finale in the entrance lobby. Read More »BIG READ: Tribute to Axed Series as New TV Season Begins