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Falling Skies

BEST of 2012 Lists

  • Friday, December 21st – Entertainment Weekly names Arrow‘s Stephen Amell a Breakout Star of 2012
  • Friday, Decmeber 21st – TV.com’s Top 100 Best of Everything ranks Fringe‘s animated homage to Monty Python as 75th
  • Wednesday, December 19th – TV.com’s Top 100 Best of Everything ranks the harness factory on Falling Skies as 98th.
  • Wednesday, December 19th – TV.com’s Top 100 Best of Everything ranks a guy exploding on The Secret Circle as 99th.

Read More »BEST of 2012 Lists

WEEKS: December 17-30, 2012

  • Friday, December 28th – SPACE channel marathon of Vancouver’s own dinosaur procedural Primeval: New World
  • Tuesday, December 25th – Arrow star Stephen Amell marries long-time girlfriend Cassandra Jean at sunset ceremony in the Caribbean.
  • Saturday, December 22nd – Psycho prequel series Bates Motel begins its holiday hiatus. Returns January 7th, 2013.
  • Saturday, December 22nd – Vancouver sitcom Package Deal begins its holiday hiatus. Returns January 7th, 2013.
  • Friday, December 21st – Fringe airs tenth episode of its final season featuring Olivia, Peter, Walter, Nina Sharp and the child Observer Michael filming in downtown Vancouver, the tragic but brave death of a favourite character and the answer to the question, Who is Donald?
  • Friday, December 21st – Sitcom Package Deal tapes in front of a live studio audience in Burnaby
  • Friday, December 21st – Bates Motel films at the Psychiatric Assessment building in the Burnaby Youth Detention Centre.
  • Friday, December 21st – Supernatural begins its holiday hiatus. Returns January 8th, 2013.
  • Friday, December 21st – Falling Skies wraps filming of its third season.
  • Thursday, December 20th – Vancouver detective series Motive begins its holiday hiatus. Returns January 6th, 2013.
  • Wednesday, December 19th – USA Network renews Psych for eighth season of filming. Here are the crime-fighting quartet — Shawn, Gus, Lassie & Jules.
  • Wednesday, December 19th – Once Upon a Time casts Rose McGowan as younger Cora.
  • Wednesday, December 19th – Once Upon a Time begins its holiday hiatus. Returns January 3rd, 2013.
  • Wednesday, December 19th – Emily Owens MD studio liquidation 10AM-6PM at North Shore Studios
  • Wednesday, December 19th – Second day of Supernatural filming inside Langara College library.
  • Tuesday, December 18th – Supernatural films inside Langara College library
  • Tuesday, December 18th – TV Guide reports Battlestar Galactica’s Baltar, aka James Callis, cast on Arrow.
  • Monday, December 17th – Vancouver dinosaur procedural Primeval: New World mid-season finale directed by Amanda Tapping Read More »WEEKS: December 17-30, 2012

Noah Wyle and Will Patton Film FALLING SKIES S3 Dream Sequence in Gastown

Falling Skies wraps filming of its third season this coming week in Vancouver. And as far as I know, few if any have seen them on location until today at the Coffee Bar in Gastown. But it sure didn’t look anything like the post-apocalyptic Falling Skies we’ve come to know. Where were the Skitters? Where were the Mechs? Where were the Overlords? Where were the even creepier aliens introduced in the season two finale? And where was 2nd Mass, the small band of insurgents named after the 2nd Massachusetts of the American Revolution, who’ve been fighting the occupying alien force for three seasons?

Noah Wyle’s Tom Mason had no beard or scruffy clothing. And Will Patton’s Captain Dan Weaver looked more like a homeless lunatic than the military leader of 2nd Mass. And what’s with all the well-dressed people carrying bags of Christmas shopping, coming and going in a cafe decorated with wreaths? It turns out today was a reshoot of a dream sequence. So it provides few clues about what drama will unfold in the third season set to air next summer on TNT in the U.S.

Read More »Noah Wyle and Will Patton Film FALLING SKIES S3 Dream Sequence in Gastown

WEEK: December 10-16, 2012

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

WEEK: October 1-7, 2012

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

Farewell to John Pope’s Harley, Destroyed in FALLING SKIES Season 2 Premiere -Updated

Who knew at a Falling Skies location shoot in Vancouver last November that we were seeing the last of  John Pope’s Harley, destroyed by a beamer that night in a scene for last week’s second season premiere? Or that this could be our first and last chance to see a 2nd Mass resistance attack on the alien invaders using  motorbikes?

Falling Skies crew turned the warehouses along Western Street near Pacific Central Station into a post-alien-invasion disaster zone dressed with ash, dried leaves, debris and overturned burnout cars for a scene of Colin Cunningham’s John Pope on his Harley rounding a corner from Northern Street onto Western Street, followed by new series regular Ryan Robbins’s Tector on a second bike. 2nd Mass’s new insurgent strategy was to ride the bikes fullout to draw fire from the aliens, so that the rest of the fighters could target the exposed Mechs and Skitters. I spotted the heads of Sarah Carter’s Maggie and Drew Roy’s Hal above the cab of the pickup truck as it headed towards watching fans on Western Street, and when they cleared out I spied Connor Jessup’s Ben and Dylan Authors’s Jimmy (someone I never thought I’d be lucky enough to see on location) in the back of the truck too. This must be the spot where the Harley was destroyed by the aliens, who’d learned to hone in on the heat of an engine. Sarah Carter’s Maggie and Drew Roy’s Hal started running  in our direction carrying their prop guns, as if escaping from some kind of explosion, followed by the others, including Peter Sinkoda’s Dai and Mpho Koaho’s Anthony. I’m not familiar with the actors who play Beserkers yet.

I wish I’d stayed on in the bitter cold that night to see the beamer explosion with its blinding white flash and noise, which scared cast and crew alike, who hadn’t expected anything of that magnitude. I also missed the filming of a scene of Colin Cunningham’s John Pope shooting his gun at the sky next to his Harley in flames. Poor man.

But I can’t really complain much since Colin Cunnigham, the star of this long night shoot, took time out to come over and talk to us early on, posing for photos with everyone who wanted one.

Colin Cunningham and Ryan Robbins round the corner from Northern Street onto Western Street on  motorcycles.

Read More »Farewell to John Pope’s Harley, Destroyed in FALLING SKIES Season 2 Premiere -Updated

BIG READ: Darker Season 2 of FALLING SKIES Filmed in Vancouver

Published April 5, 2012 on Vancouver is Awesome

The second season of sci-fi summer hit Falling Skies takes place three months after Noah Wyle‘s father of three boys boarded an alien spacecraft in a bid to protect his middle son. It’s said to be an even darker look at the trials and tribulations of a small band of insurgents fighting against an occupying alien force which has killed most of the world’s adults and captured their children. So it’s appropriate they filmed it in Vancouver over the fall and winter durng our Rainocalypse, instead of in the Toronto area over the summer and fall in the mainly sunny weather of season one.

Noah Wyle (from ER) is former History professor Tom Mason, the civilian second-in-command of a Boston insurgent group named after the 2nd Massachusetts of the American Revolution and made up of about 300 fighters and civilians. Mason, whose wife was killed in the initial attack, has three sons —  Hal, played by Drew Roy, and Ben and Matt, played by  Connor Jessup and Maxim Knight.  Middle son Ben has been captured by the insectoid multi-legged aliens known as Skitters and harnessed. These harnesses are attached to the children’s spines and act as some kind of biomechancial device that allows the aliens to control their minds. Much of the first season is spent trying to get Ben back and to figure out how to remove his harness without killing him. But even when they do get the harness off Ben, it’s clear he’s not free from alien mind control. And that’s why his father boards the alien spaceship in the season one finale to find a way to protect Ben and stop the harnessing of kids.

This is the family show in a post-apocalyptic setting that legendary director Steven Spielberg had envisioned. Other key civilians are Moon Bloodgood as pediatrician Anne Glass and Seychelle Gabrielle as Lourdes, who’ve formed a makeshift medical clinic for the group. Will Patton is Captain Dan Weaver, the military leader of the 2nd Mass and Mpho Koaho as Thomas (a former Boston cop) and Peter Shinkoda as Dai are two of its best fighters. Jesse Schram is Karen Nadler, who starts off as Ben’s girlfriend and fellow scout until she is captured and harnessed. Sarah Carter‘s Maggie takes her place on the frontlines of 2nd Mass and maybe as Ben’s girlfriend too in the upcoming season.

Maggie happens to be the survivor of a gang of marauders headed up by Colin Cunningham’s charismatic and wickedly funny John Pope, an ex-con who causes mayhem wherever he goes, nicknaming Tom Mason, “Papa Smurf”; Karen, “Sexy Freedom Fighter”; Hal. “Strapping Young Man”; Anthony, “Black….Looks Like a Gangbanger”; and Dai, “Oriental of Some Kind” when they’re briefly in his custody early on. No one has better lines than Pope in this series, like his protest, “What am I? Canada”, when his 2nd Mass captors insist he go unarmed on a sortee. Here is Cunningham in character as John Pope on set in Vancouver.

At the Falling Skies panel at the Emerald City ComicCon last Friday in Seattle, new showrunner Remi Aubuchon (an SGU Stargate Universe writer/producer) and cast Colin Cunningham (SG-1’s Major Paul Davis) and Drew Roy talked about the upcoming second season and showed a three-minute teaser The Resistance Continues.

Noah Wyle’s Tom Mason has not been seen or heard from in three months. Many of 2nd Mass have died Read More »BIG READ: Darker Season 2 of FALLING SKIES Filmed in Vancouver