VIFF Forum 2012 – Creating Sci-Fi Story Worlds from VIFF on Vimeo. Jane Espenson: Writer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, Caprica and consulting… Read More »VIFF INDUSTRY: ONCE UPON A TIME’s Jane Espenson, EUREKA’s Amy Berg & CONTINUUM’s Simon Barry on 2012 Writers Panel
Five weeks after the mid-season finale, Primeval: New World returns tonight on a new night with a fresh episode called Breakthrough, featuring a very special… Read More »EUREKA’s Colin Ferguson & Niall Matter Reunite on Tonight’s PRIMEVAL: NEW WORLD
In the last ever episode of Eureka tonight, the Department of Defense’s closure of this charming, eccentric town — inhabited by brilliant scientists working on top-secret projects… Read More »#Eureka’s Last Ever Episode – Updated
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
On tonight’s Eureka, Allison Blake’s snobby brother Marcus comes to town to meet his new Sheriff brother-in-law, Jack Carter. Fun fact: Marcus, who is prejudiced against “dumb people”, is played by Salli Richardson-Whitfield’s real-life husband Dondre Whitfield.
Marcus meets Colin Ferguson’s Sheriff Carter and Trevor Jackson’s Kevin chasing and trying to catch what will turn out to be a crazy pair of robotic legs after computer-generated effects. During the filming in downtown Chilliwack dressed as Eureka, a stunt woman in a green skinsuit and a crew member carrying a mannequin leg played this extremely agile lower torso. I can’t wait to see it.
Of course this is how the supercilious Marcus meets Carter: lying pinned to the grass by those robotic crazy legs wrapped around his neck.
Read More »Filming of Tonight’s Sheriff Carter Stunts for #Eureka – Updated
Sheriff Jack Carter faces his biggest challenge yet: trying to figure out what happened to the town’s brilliant scientists, who mysteriously vanished just before their planned… Read More »#Eureka’s Season Five Premiere – Updated
Published September 19, 2011 on Vancouver is Awesome
The fourth season of life in the charmingly-eccentric and scientifically-dysfunctional town of Eureka ends with a big emotional cliffhanger tonight on the Syfy network in the U.S. We will have to wait three more weeks in Canada to start seeing the back half of season four on the SPACE channel. And the fifth and final season of Eureka won’t air until sometime next year in either country (apart from the animated Christmas episode this December). That’s why it feels so strange to write about or show anything of the Eureka series finale, which wrapped filming in Vancouver before the Labour Day weekend. Everything is a potential spoiler.
A month ago, Eureka crew transformed two blocks of Wellington Street in Chilliwack into the Main Street of their fictional town for the very last time: erecting the large Sheriff’s Office and Cafe Diem facades, adding the fake bronze statue/fountain of Archimedes and putting their own signage on the Teddy Bear Dreams clothing store (the owner told me Eureka star Salli Richardson-Whitfield bought several items there over the years). Production also set up running tabs at two downtown Chilliwack institutions: the Decade Coffee House and Sticky’s Candy, where a young salesgirl showed me the empty vats of ice cream consumed by Eureka crew in a day’s filming.
Cast and crew seemed just as verklempt at that last shoot in Chilliwack as the fans who’d come to say goodbye. I saw Salli Richardson-Whitfield hugging the Eureka stunt coordinator and Tembi Locke snapping photos with her camera phone of her TV husband Joe Morton. One of the Eureka producers brought his fancy DSLR to play set photographer, posing Colin Ferguson and Salli Richardson-Whitfield on a bench ahead of their big scene together. Director Matt Hastings couldn’t resist photobombing that beautifully-staged shot, which made everyone laugh and then cry.
Laughter and tears. Everything about that day in Chilliwack seemed bittersweet. 
Syfy had renewed and then cancelled Eureka earlier in August, belatedly coughing up enough money to film this last-minute wrap-up episode. Read More »BIG READ: EUREKA Series Finale
