Congratulations to Continuum creator/showrunner Simon Barry, cast, crew and Artifex Studios on a second season renewal of the hit sci-fi series whose first season was filmed… Read More »Vancouver’s own CONTINUUM Renewed for 2nd Season & Picked Up By US Network Syfy – Updated
In early May, Continuum filled the 600 block Thurlow in downtown Vancouver with 125 extras, flashing prop Vancouver police cars, an emergency vehicle and a firetruck to film scenes of a bomb scare evacuation for last night’s season finale, featuring stars Rachel Nichols and Victor Webster and guest stars Ian Tracey (Da Vinci’s Inquest, Intelligence, Sanctuary), as the wonderfully wacky man from the future, and Nicholas Lea (The X-Files, V), as a suspicious CSIS officer. Unfortunately this bomb scare turned out to be a diversion and the building that Liber8 had targeted was the iconic Arthur Erickson-designed concrete tower at 1075 West Georgia next door.
Read More »Ian Tracey and Nicholas Lea Guest-Star on CONTINUUM Season One Finale
On Continuum’s season finale entitled Endtime, Rachel Nichols’s Kiera Cameron and Erik Knudsen’s Alec Sandler race to prevent a 2012 terrorist attack which defines the future, set off by Tony Amedola’s Liber8 leader Kagame, who’d been sent back in time to do exactly this. I saw them film Nichols and Knudsen running into the iconic Arthur Erickson-designed building at 1075 West Georgia Street in Vancouver in early May in take after take. Zooming in, I could see them in conversation with someone in a police uniform but never suspected it was Tony Amendola’s Kagame. Watching the finished product last night, I wondered if the late Arthur Erickson would be pleased or annoyed to see his building digitally destroyed like this on screen. I think he would be pleased.
Read More »CONTINUUM Digitally Explodes Arthur Erickson-Designed Building in Season One Finale
Continuum crew set up an Occupy Vancouver-style Tent City on the CBC Vancouver plaza in March to do two days of filming for episode six, Time’s Up. On the first day of shooting, a peaceful protest rally against fake oil company Exotrol escalates to violence with prop Vancouver Mounted Police on the scene to control the fake rioters throwing prop bricks. [Update: Rachel Nichols’s Kiera Cameron and Victor Webster’s Carlos Fonnegra arrive before the violence and cop-from-the-future Kiera sees her first horse.]
I blame the terrorists-from-the-future Liber8 for inflaming these present-day dissenters, who carry handmade signs saying things like — I’ll Believe Corporations Are People When Texas Executes One (my favourite); Stop the Pipe Line; Fish Can’t Breathe Oil; Oil & Water Do Not Mix;, My Mom Taught Me to Share; Save Mother Earth; It’s Time to Think Outside the Barrel; Your Fault My Problem; and No Fracking Way!
Read More »Occupy Vancouver-Style Tent City on CONTINUUM – Updated
On Sunday’s night’s Continuum, entitled A Test of Time, our terrorists-from-the-future Liber8 decide to test a theory that they might cease to exist if their ancestors are killed. They target Kiera Cameron’s grandmother to see what would happen to Cameron if her grandmother died.
I saw Rachel Nichols’s Kiera Cameron filming a scene for episode five in early March at The Centre dressed as fictional Pacific Coastal University in downtown Vancouver. She talks to some of the students and then puts one of them in the back of the blue uunmarked Vancouver Police Department car. When I learned the epsiode logline, I wondered if this young woman could be Kiera’s grandmother in 2012.
Read More »Who is Kiera’s Grandmother on CONTINUUM 1×05? – Updated
In tonight’s hit Vancouver-as-Vancouver sci-fi series Continuum, our VPD detective duo pay a visit to the iconic Vancouver Public Library as part of their investigation into a series of murders in which victims have been drained of endocrine fluid in an effort to save the leader of terrorist group Liber8. Here’s a link to a promo photo of Rachel Nichols’s cop-from-the-future Keira Cameron and Victor Webster’s present-day-cop Carlos Fonnegra examining a corpse. And below are some of my behind-the-scenes photos of Nichols and Webster filming scenes with the medical examiner for episode three’s Wasting Time at the central library, with a prop Vancouver Police squad car and VPD extras in the background.
Originally called Out of Time, Continuum is about a future police officer Kiera Cameron who gets swept up in an escape by terrorist group Liber8 and travels back in time with them from Vancouver in the year 2077 to Vancouver in the year 2012, where she partners with detective Carlos Fonnegra to stop Liber8 from changing the future from the past.
The yet-to-be-cast 13-episode CTV series Motive, about a “feisty female Vancouver detective” solving murders, is the latest TV drama series to let Vancouver play itself. We’ve gone from zero to four in a very short time– possibly five if Endgame is resurrected.
Why now? Some credit the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games for making our city “cool” and recognizable the world over.
While CBC’s hit adventure series Arctic Air mainly films its Yellowknife interiors on permanent sets in Aldergrove and its exteriors in Yellowknife, when the action is in our city, as it was in the wonderfully-titled episode Vancouver is Such a Screwed-Up City, then Vancouver plays itself.
And Showcase’s out-of-the-box hit Continuum features not one but two Vancouvers. In the part sci-fi, part procedural Continuum, a future police officer travels back in time from Vancouver in the year 2077 to Vancouver in the year 2012, swept up in an escape by a group of terrorists — Liber8 – who plan to change the future from the past by targeting the corporations that will come to rule the world. Here’s Rachel Nichols’s officer-from-the-future at the Vancouver Public Library.
Over at SPACE’s upcoming sci-fi and procedural series Primeval: New World, we can look forward to seeing apartment-building-sized dinosaurs and other primeval creatures rampaging through our neighbourhoods like Stanley Park, Coal Harbour and the Olympic Village. Read More »CTV Orders New Vancouver-Set Procedural MOTIVE to Series
Continuum’s debut last night on Showcase was big. How big? 1.7 million Canadians tuned into the two airings. That makes it the #1 drama on cable this year (see press release)
Originally called Out of Time, Continuum is part sci fi, part police procedural about a future police officer Kiera Cameron (Rachel Nichols), who travels back in time from Vancouver in the year 2077 to Vancouver in the year 2012, swept up in an escape by a group of terrorists — Liber8 — who plan to change the future from the past by targeting the corporations that will come to rule the world. Cameron impersonates a present-day police officer and ends up being partnered with detective Carlos Fonnegra (Victor Webster), who refuses to give her a weapon in this shootout with the terrorists, filmed in Victory Square this past January. Give her a weapon Fonnegra. She needs one.
Read More »CONTINUUM Debut is Highest-Rated Canadian Cable Drama of Year – Updated
Published May 24, 2012 on Vancouver is Awesome
How did Continuum creator Simon Barry conceive of a Vancouver in 2077 which has become North America’s financial centre in a world where corporations have taken over failed governments? By reading and watching the news, of course. He calls it more science fact than science fiction. In this dystopian future, rising seas from global climate change have wiped out the east coast but Vancouver is protected by a dam across English Bay.
So why hasn’t the Lions Gate Bridge been dealt with in 2077?, joked one of the Continuum panel at Vancouver Fan Expo in April. Is the city all bike lanes in the future?, joked a fan during the Q&A, prompting Barry to respond that there are no cars at all in his future Vancouver. And apparently no horses either.
Continuum, originally called Out of Time in his pilot script, is part sci fi, part police procedural about a future police officer Kiera Cameron, played by Rachel Nichols, who travels back in time from Vancouver in the year 2077 to Vancouver in the year 2012, chasing a group of terrorists who plan to change the future from the past by targeting the corporations that will come to rule the world. But are they really terrorists? Perhaps they are freedom fighters?
One such corporation is fictional Exotrol, where Continuum staged an Occupy Vancouver-style protest at CBC Vancouver in mid-March for an upcoming episode. Rachel Nichols and Victor Webster, as her 2012 Vancouver police detectuve partner Carlos Fonnegra, arrived on the scene in an unmarked blue police car.
Read More »BIG READ: Vancouver Cop-From-The-Future Series CONTINUUM Debuts This Sunday