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SHOOT: SUPERNATURAL 8×11 LARP and the Real Girl Set in Coquitlam’s Mundy Park

Best LARP Ever? And I missed it. Supernatural filmed for several days on its LARP (live action role playing) set in Coquitlam’s Mundy Park  this past week and last. Locals walking their dogs told me they spotted both Jared Padalecki’s Sam and Jensen Ackles’s Dean in among all the background performers dressed in medieval garb for what the sign says is Michigan’s largest LARPing game: MoonDoor, The Battle of Kingdoms. As disappointed as I am to have missed people dressed up like knights for the eleventh episode of season eight, what I’m really kicking myself for is not going out in the pouring rain to try to catch a glimpse of geek goddess Felicia Day (Eureka, Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog)’s return as adorkable hacker Charlie.

LARP and the Real Girl (a clever pun on the Ryan Gosling flick Lars and the Real Girl) also features a new character Gerard, a LARPer who goes too far playing this medieval game. Season Eight showrunner Jeremy Carver told TV sites that Supernatural will approach the LARPing universe differently than it has in the past. I look forward to seeing what they do on screen.

Read More »SHOOT: SUPERNATURAL 8×11 LARP and the Real Girl Set in Coquitlam’s Mundy Park

WEEK: November 5-11, 2012

  • Sunday, November 11th – Once Upon a Time‘s Red Riding Hood/Ruby-centric episode 2×07 Child of the Moon.
  • Sunday, November 11th – Glen Schaefer (The Province)’s feature on Brent Butt’s big movie No Clue — No Bogart in this Joint
  • Friday, November 9th – Fringe reveals the child Observer whom Walter hid in a pocket universe in the sixth episode of the final season, Through the Looking Glass and What Walter Found.
  • Friday, November 9th – Red Widow films on the North Vancouver waterfront.
  • Friday, November 9th – Bates Motel films in Fort Langley.
  • Friday, November 9th – Battlestar Galactica prequel Blood and Chrome with Ben Cotton debuts first and second webisodes
  • Thursday, November 8th – Sitcom Package Deal tapes its pilot in front of live studio audience in Burnaby.
  • Thursday, November 8th – Brent Butt’s No Clue films in Coal Harbour on a yacht with a follow boat and a technocrane photographed by Rusty Deluce.
  • Thrusday, November 8th – Emily Owens M.D.’s Mamie Gummer & Justin Hartley film at UBC’s Life Sciences Centre,
  • Thursday, November 8th – Fringe films episode eleven on the platform for the West Coast Express at the Waterfront station with Loyalist soldiers, Peter, Olivia, Walter and the child Observer.
  • Thursday, November 8th – News of AMC and Netflix nearing deal for surprise third season of The Killing via Deadline.com.
  • Thursday, November 8th – News of Twilight fans already lining up for Monday’s Los Angeles premiere of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn 2 Read More »WEEK: November 5-11, 2012

SHOOT: FRINGE’s Mysterious Child Observer

Last night’s Through the Looking Glass and What Walter Found There introduced Rowan Longworth’s mysterious child Observer whom Walter had kept hidden for twenty years in a pocket reality inside an old apartment building played by the West End’s Sherburn building. But when the Fringe team finally makes their way to apartment 413 in this Alice-in-Wonderland-like world, the mysterious child Observer is gone.

Will they find him? Of course they will. And so my photos of the child Observer filming episode ten this week are no longer such a big spoiler. The bald boy character we first met in season one (played by a different young actor) was on set for Monday’s epic downtown shoot with Anna Torv’s Olivia, Joshua Jackson’s Peter, John Noble’s Walter and Blair Brown’s Nina Sharp in her wheelchair at one of the five different locations. And also on set a few days later when Fringe filmed in an alley west of the Terminal City Ironworks compound in east Vancouver with the same cast. And then on Thursday for episode eleven at the Waterfront station stop for the West Coast Express made to look like a train station stop in 2036 with Loyalist soldiers patrolling the platform.

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YVRShoots Series – Sitcom PACKAGE DEAL Live in Burnaby

Published November 9, 2012 on Vancouver is Awesome

Update: While taped in Burnaby, Package Deal is set in Toronto.

Partway through the live taping of sitcom Package Deal’s pilot episode last night I had to zone out for a bit, exhausted from laughing non-stop for hours. Of course the sitcom is laugh-out-loud funny, although the details are embargoed until after the premiere airs early next year on Citytv. I can tell you that the laughs for the acerbic Harland Williams’s flubbing of his lines were just as big as when he did it right. “That’s not the line,” Williams told the audience. “Stop laughing, I’m sensitive.”  Williams, more than anyone else, cracked up his fellow cast members on set. Meanwhile, wrangler/perfomer Dave Dimapalis kept us entertained  in the audience between takes by coaxing volunteers to play progressively lewder games. Bachelorette #1 in the Bachelor game quipped “100% down” when asked how she would label herself in a store. Is it any surprise the blindfolded bachelor picked her from three possible candidates? I was rooting for Bachelorette #2 , by the way, who described herself as “a cub not yet a cougar.”  And halfway through the taping,: pages came round with pizza slices from the Flying Wedge to keep our energy up.

Read More »YVRShoots Series – Sitcom PACKAGE DEAL Live in Burnaby

SHOOT: ONCE UPON A TIME’s Captain Hook With a Spyglass in Steveston for 2×11 – Updated

Watch your back Rumplestiltskin. Colin O’Donoghue’s charming and dangerously seductive Captain Hook is looking for a portal to take him to Storybrooke so that he can exact his revenge on the Dark One, who cut off his hand and crushed the heart of his beloved. And Hook will align himself with anyone who can get him there. Emma leaving Hook shackled in the Giant’s treasure house last Sunday night will prove but a temporary setback for Fairytale Land’s most eligible bachelor.

So the question is when — not if —  Hook will show up in Storybrooke. Still, it was an unexpected treat to see O’Donoghue filming scenes on a rooftop in Steveston yesterday and to have crew allow a handful of spectators who’d braved the rain to photograph him when the cameras weren’t rolling. Such an unusual location for Once Upon a Time. Is this rooftop in Storybrooke or Fairytale Land? If Storybrooke, Hook might consider a change of wardrobe because he’s not going to blend in dressed in black leather.

Read More »SHOOT: ONCE UPON A TIME’s Captain Hook With a Spyglass in Steveston for 2×11 – Updated

SHOOT: FRINGE’s Epic Downtown Shoot with Five Exterior Locations in One Day for 5×10 – Updated

What a day. Fringe filmed sequences with Anna Torv’s Olivia Dunham, Joshua Jackson’s Peter Bishop , John Noble’s Walter Bishop, Blair Brown’s Nina Sharp and a mysterious boy yesterday in five different downtown Vancouver locations for the tenth episode of the final season. Crew dressed each location as the future Observer-occupied world of 2036 using a prop Ministry of Science van, a prop check point and traffic jam, a prop food cart, Resistance posters and dozens of background performers dressed as Observers, Loyalist soliders and citizens in 1940s clothing.

Read More »SHOOT: FRINGE’s Epic Downtown Shoot with Five Exterior Locations in One Day for 5×10 – Updated

PHOTO RECAP: Vancouver as Vancouver in ONCE UPON A TIME 2×06

A few thoughts on Tallahassee, my favourite Once Upon a Time episode of season two so far. I predicted a long con of Jennifer Morrison’s young Emma Swan by Michael Raymond-James’s fellow thief Neal Cassady but did not anticipate he would do it out of love for her after Eion Bailey’s August showed him Emma’s destiny to break the curse in Storybrooke.

I’d seen the thieving pair on set in the Downtown Eastside near the Main Street overpass filming the scene of them being pulled over by the Portland police after Emma learns she “stole a stolen car.”

Once Upon a Time filmed later scenes of the new “Bonnie & Clyde” examining their stolen loot from a corner store  in a motel room at the City Centre Motor Hotel on Main Street and then planning to make a real home together in Tallahassee.

Read More »PHOTO RECAP: Vancouver as Vancouver in ONCE UPON A TIME 2×06