Sunday, March 3rd- Once Upon a Time panel at PaleyFest with creators & cast Ginnifer Goodwin, Josh Dallas, Jennifer Morrison, Lana Parrilla, Robert Carlyle, Emilie de Ravin & Colin O’Donoghue. Livestreamed at 1:30 p.m. PT.
Sunday, March 3rd – Vancouver cop-from-the-future series Continuum-athon on Syfy in the U.S. First seven episodes of season one.
Friday, March 1st – Once Upon a Time films in Steveston. Day shoot: Jennifer Morrison & Jared Gilmore cross street & talk in Emma’s yellow VW bug. Fraturday night shoot on the docks with Lana Parrilla.
Friday, March 1st – Showcase announces Continuum‘s season two premiere date is Sunday, April 21st. Meantime, crew films scenes in the rain in Victory Square park w/ Rachel Nichols & Ian Tracey. And a night shoot in Shanty Town set on top of Gastown parkade.
Friday, March 1st – Kokanee’s The Movie Out Here gets a blue carpet premiere at International Village with Glacier Girls and star Robin Nielsen but no Sasquatch. a
Red Widow added Goran Visnjic to the cast after the pilot was filmed, much to the delight of his Vancouver fans who know him as noble Dr. Luka Kovac on ER.
But this time Goran Visnjic is not the good guy. He’s the Big Bad. His Russian mafia is blamed for the shooting of Marta Walraven (Radha Mitchell)’s husband in the season premiere. She should be mourning but must work with her husband’s killers to repay the [$1.5 million ] debt owed to mob boss Nicholae Schiller (Goran Visnjic) and to protect her family.
I looked for Goran Visnjic early on at the Russian mob restaurant Cafe Rossiya played by Lana Lou’s restaurant in the Downtown Eastside but never caught him in an exterior scene until Red Widow’s season finale filmed at the Exchange Tower downtown.
[Update: In the two-hour premiere, Goran Visnijic demonstrated his black belt in kung-fu in a sparring scene. Impressive.]
Whatever else is going on in Storybrooke in the nineteenth episode of season two, newly-acquainted father-and-son Baelfire and Henry, and the actors who play them, continue to bond.
Michael Raymond-James and Jared Gilmore had an incredible amount of fun rehearsing and filming their play sword fight in Fisherman’s Park in Steveston yesterday morning and early afternoon in front of passersby, local fans and two fans visiting from France.
Michael Raymond-James jumped on a picnic table at one point in their rambling play sword fight down the grassy hill of the park. And during one take, Raymond-James jokingly held his wooden sword to the throat of the boom operator once he’d moved out of frame.
Once Upon a Time put up a new prop Historical Storybrooke map in Steveston today. I photographed it but haven’t had a chance to look at it closely, except to notice the absence of Storybrooke Town Hall (usually played by Fort Langley Community Hall).
Motive Cast — Brendan Penny, Lauren Holly, Louis Ferreira, Kristin Lehman and Roger Cross — CTV promo image
The murder is just the beginning. There’s always a motive and Vancouver homicide detective Angie Flynn (Kristin Lehman) will find it. Filming wrapped last Friday on Motive’s thirteen-episode first season.
Motive debuted in a prime but delayed post-Super Bowl slot on CTV to 1.23 million Canadians, the culmination of an unprecedented publicity campaign by CTV for a Canadian show. Normally, only CTV’s American simulcast shows get this scale of rollout. And in a sweet twist, American network ABC has picked up the Vancouver crime drama for broadcast this summer.
Ratings held steady after Motive’s move to its regular 9 p.m. on Sundays slot, dipping for the second episode but rising back over one million for the third episode, to give Canada’s #1 new drama a series-to-date average of 1.06 million viewers.
Instead of a regular whodunit that focuses on who did the crime, Motive is a whydunit that focuses on why the crime was committed in the first place. The Killer and The Victim are revealed to the audience at the top of the show and we follow detectives Angie Flynn (Kristin Lehman) and Oscar Vega (Louis Ferreria) as they uncover the reasons behind the murder.
Once Upon a Time makes TV looks like the movies every week. Revolutionary Z.E.U.S. visual effects technology allows the modern fairy tale series to be as epic as a movie on a TV budget. If you looked through a camera lense or a monitor in studio in Vancouver you would see scenes rendered in real time while the cast performs on mostly empty green screen stages. And beautiful British Columbia has a hand in creating stunning backdrops too with on-location filming in our forests, deserts and oceans for Fairy Tale Land and in the village of Steveston for present-day Storybrooke.
But Once Upon a Time would be just pretty pictures if the creators and cast didn’t bring emotion to the stories they tell. Here are some promo photos of the actors who make us care about fairy tale characters week after week.
Charming (Josh Dallas) and his daughter Emma (Jennifer Morrison) on location in Steveston south of Vancouver.
