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CTV’s Vancouver Crime Drama Hit MOTIVE Wraps Filming of Its First Season


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.

Read More »CTV’s Vancouver Crime Drama Hit MOTIVE Wraps Filming of Its First Season

Vancouver’s own PRIMEVAL: NEW WORLD Debuts on WATCH in the U.K.

Are Vancouver VFX dinosaurs better than the British ones? British audiences will get a chance to compare on Primeval: New World tonight when UKTV’s WATCH channel debuts the series, a spinoff of Britain’s own Primeval. In fact, ARC’s Connor Temple (Andrew-Lee Potts) even paid a visit from London to the Vancouver set last March to warn new team leader Evan Cross (Niall Matter) about something that has gone wrong and to have a laugh with the new cast.

Here’s a WATCH promo showing Evan Cross (Niall Matter) and a predator control officer (Tom Butler) looking for anomalies (time portals) in Stanley Park.

[sz-youtube url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=MBDXFUQA658″ /]

After you’ve seen the premiere, check out the making of the kickass stunt from the cold open, filmed at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce tower in downtown Vancouver. I wish I’d known about this shoot ahead of time.

Read More »Vancouver’s own PRIMEVAL: NEW WORLD Debuts on WATCH in the U.K.

WEEK: September 24-30 2012

PRIMEVAL’s Andrew-Lee Potts Has a Laugh Filming This Fall’s PRIMEVAL: NEW WORLD

Upcoming sci-fi series Primeval: New World has a little more than three weeks of filming left before wrapping its first season here, so it seems like a good time to revisit the Coal Harbour location shoots that will feature in its series premiere.

Andrew-Lee Potts, aka Conner Temple from the original British series Primeval, flew in this past March to guest star on the first episode of the Vancouver spinoff. From what I saw of a scene at Harbour Green Park in Coal Harbour, Potts’s Temple walks from the  sea wall towards the crime scene and shows something to Niall Matter’s rich Vancouver software genius Evan Cross near the yellow crime scene tape. It’s all very serious, as it should be, considering the prosthetic body of a parachutist victim of some kind of flying dinosaur attack lying on a gurney by the washrooms. Matter’s Evan Cross confers with Sara Canning’s Predator Control Officer Dylan Weir and Danny Rahim’s Mac Rendell. Canning’s Weir then walks back to the fake corpse and that was it, as far as I could see.

Read More »PRIMEVAL’s Andrew-Lee Potts Has a Laugh Filming This Fall’s PRIMEVAL: NEW WORLD

BIG READ: Vancouver’s CONTINUUM & PRIMEVAL: NEW WORLD at First Fan Expo Vancouver

Published April 17, 2012 on Vancouver is Awesome

Imagine two Vancouver-as-Vancouver TV series filming here, with B.C. Place stadium, the central Vancouver Public Library, Woodwards’ revolving “W”, Granville Island, Stanley Park and other local landmarks as themselves. It’s so rare for us to have one Vancouver-set series filming here, far less two. So come to our city’s first Fan Expo this Saturday, where you’ll get sneak peeks of both, as well as the chance to meet the showrunners and cast.

Continuum is about some kind of future officer named Kiera Cameron 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. You may have seen some of the spectacular-future-downtown-skyline teasers on Showcase, where the 10-episode series debuts in late May. Or the 2077/2012 split skylines on the Continuum show poster.

Continuum stars Rachel Nichols as Kiera Cameron, who joins the local Vancouver police force with Victor Webster as her 2012 detetective partner. You can see Nichols as her character filming in Vancouver with the Woodwards “W” in the background in a promo photo from the show. I’ve photographed Continuum filming at Victory Square, outside and inside the central Vancouver Public Library, The Centre and CBC Vancouver so far with prop Vancouver Police cars and VPD extras alongside real ones. Below is my photo of Nichols exiting an unmarked police car with the Vancouver Public Library reflected in the windshield. And below that is my photo of  Nichols and her co-star Victor Webster filming in a snowstorm at Victory Square. It will be a veritable Vancouver-palooza in each episode.

Read More »BIG READ: Vancouver’s CONTINUUM & PRIMEVAL: NEW WORLD at First Fan Expo Vancouver