“Everyone has the potential to break bad. Most of us do not break bad.” – Vince Gilligan. Breaking Bad is a show about transition —… Read More »VIFF FORUM: The Last Cook with BREAKING BAD Creator Vince Gilligan in 2013
Sunday, September 8th – Cedar Cove 1×09 And the Winner Is airs on the W network. The town’s charity bachelor auction starring Andie MacDowell, Dylan Neal… Read More »WEEK: September 2-8, 2013
Updated: King & Maxwell 1×02 Second Chances aired June 17, 2013 on TNT.
New TNT series King & Maxwell began filming yesterday in Vancouver. I caught up with them setting up in an alley behind the Ovaltine Cafe in the downtown eastside for a scene of the former secret service agents turned private investigators Sean King (Jon Tenney from The Closer) and Michelle Maxwell (Rebecca Romijn from The X-Men franchise) driving up, getting out of the car and walking in the cafe’s rear entrance.
King & Maxwell — characters from the David Baldacci books set in Washington, D.C. — returned downtown this morning to film scenes outside The Centre of a man being led out in handcuffs and put in the back of an unmarked squad car that drives away. Then people run in terror as a young woman holding a gun appears on the sidewalk. Some yellow Washington D.C. cabs are parked on Robson Street for later scenes.
Read More »SHOOT: Jon Tenney & Rebecca Romijn Film KING & MAXWELL 1×02 at The Centre
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
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
Published March 24, 2011 on Vancouver is Awesome
I do try to photograph at least part of each TV series filming in Vancouver but some are more difficult than others. The CW’s Smallville, whose cast and crew celebrated ten seasons here at a big wrap party at the Vancouver Club last Saturday, filmed on permanent private sets and rarely went on location in their final season. And the incredibly fit young stars of the CW’s Hellcats, who instantly topped the local paparazzi list of saleable celebrity shots in their first season, attract a pack of paps and autograph hounds to each location shoot, as well as their daily workouts.
At its core, Hellcats is the story of friendship between pre-law-student-turned-cheerleader -for-scholarship-money Marti, played by Aly Milchalka, and her roommate and fellow cheerleader the very-religious-and-sheltered Savannah, played by Ashley Tisdale, at the fictional Lancer University in Memphis, Tennessee. Throw in dance numbers in skimpy cheerleader uniforms and lots of hook-ups among the main characters and you get a demographic hit. CW executives gave an early full season order, announcing they were “thrilled that [it] paid off for us.”
But critical reaction to the series is a mixed bag with some calling it “soft porn” and others pronouncing it “not trashy enough”. The only consensus: that the series has restored Ashley Tisdale to something approaching the same level of stardom she experienced with High School Musical, with photos of her coming and going from her daily workout out a fitness club near the Shangri-la Hotel appearing almost daily in celebrity blogs. She had to hire a security assistant to accompany her in public.
After filming its pilot here in Vancouver last April, Hellcats returned to shoot the series from mid-summer to late winter, favouring locations at several local campuses, including BCIT, Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia. I first caught up with them filming an exterior scene on the UBC campus at the end of November with cameras forced to shoot with snow on the ground. Read More »BIG READ: HELLCATS Wrap First Season at The Centre