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Vancouver Convention Centre

WEEK: March 18-24, 2013

SHOOT: GODZILLA turns Vancouver Convention Centre into Honolulu Airport Terminal – Updated

Update: “Earthquake Rocks Eastern Japan” says news crawl on set screen.

Japanese monster 3D reboot Godzilla with Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Bryan Cranston, David Straitharn and Ken Watanabe from a script by The Walking Dead’s Frank Darabont has begun filming here and on Vancouver Island. Godzilla crew transformed the Vancouver Convention Centre into what looks like the [Honolulu International Airport in Hawaii] last weekend. And on Vancouver Island, crew transported WRail train cars and a locomotive from New Westminster to tracks near Shawnigan Lake and started filming in Nanaimo. Aaron Taylor-Johnson could be on set inside the Convention Centre but Bryan Cranston is not expected here until he wraps filming of the Breaking Bad series finale.

6.3 Earthquake Rocks Eastern Japan, says newsreel.

Read More »SHOOT: GODZILLA turns Vancouver Convention Centre into Honolulu Airport Terminal – Updated

SHOOT: Newlywed Stephen Amell Steals Motorcycle for ARROW 1×15 at Portal Park Downtown

Newly-married Arrow star Stephen Amell shot a scene last night in the winter cold at downtown Vancouver’s Portal Park of his character Oliver Queen dressed in a sharp suit and stealing a motorcycle. You’d think a billionaire like Queen could toss the guy a few bucks to borrow his bike but the owner refused to give it up and Queen had to adminster a beatdown. Amell did the fake beatdown himself from several different camera angles until his stunt double took over for the stunt riding and Amell waved goodbye to a fan from his departing star car. Not long after, news broke on Just Jared.com that Amell had married his longtime girlfriend Cassandra Jean over the holiday hiatus in a sunset Caribbean ceremony on Christmas Day. That might explain Arrow fight coordinator James Bamford and his wife’s Caribbean snaps over the holiday hiatus. Wonder how many Arrow cast and crew attended?

Read More »SHOOT: Newlywed Stephen Amell Steals Motorcycle for ARROW 1×15 at Portal Park Downtown

Vancouver’s own PRIMEVAL: NEW WORLD Debuts October 29th on SPACE Channel

Dinosaurs are running amok in Vancouver. And they’re hungry. New series Primeval: New World debuts Monday, October 29th, on the SPACE channel.

Five months ago, InnerSPACE hosts Teddy Wilson, Ajay Fry and Cynthia Loyst introduced this North American spinoff of the popular Brit series Primeval to an enthusiastic genre audience at Vancouver Fan Expo. Back then, co-showrunner Martin Wood described the Vancouver series as a cop drama, but with dinosaurs as the crooks of the week. Very very large crooks. These anomalies suddenly appear and create havoc in our neighbourhoods like downtown Vancouver, Stanley Park, the Olympic Village, Thunderbird Arena at  the University of British Columbia and even a local Canadian Tire store.

And our dinosaurs are even more kickass than the British ones thanks to visual effects whiz Mark Savela. See the new trailer.

So the Hunt is On, with Sara Canning as animal predator expert Dylan Weir and Niall Matter as team leader Evan Cross.

Primeval: New World showrunners Martin Wood and Gillian Horvath at Vancouver Fan Expo.

Niall Matter at the Vancouver Expo panel.

Niall Matter and Teddy Wilson show off their  matching blue shirts.

Read More »Vancouver’s own PRIMEVAL: NEW WORLD Debuts October 29th on SPACE Channel

FAN EXPO: CONTINUUM Presentation at Fan Expo Vancouver

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 last Saturday. Is the city all bike lanes in 2077?,  joked a fan during the Q & A, prompting Barry to respond that there are no cars at all in his future Vancouver.

Read More »FAN EXPO: CONTINUUM Presentation at Fan Expo Vancouver

BIG READ: FRINGE is Trending in Vancouver and Worldwide

Published February 17, 2012 on Vancouver is Awesome

A Skype discussion early this year led to an amazing social media campaign by Fringe fans to make sure people knew their ratings-challenged show was returning in mid-January with a Winter Premiere after a long two-month hiatus. For five consecutive Friday nights, their unique episode hashtags have trended on Twitter worldwide, in the U.S. and in Vancouver. You may have seen #crosstheline, #enemyofmyenemy, #observeitlive, #takethelead and #breakingout trending and wondered what they were. Feel free to join in tonight by tweeting this week’s hashtag #BeaBetterMan after 5 p.m. our time.

The Fringe Campaign organized by @Fringenuity is smart. Audience isn’t just about Nielsen ratings anymore. Fringe has proved itself a social media success with a big presence on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. I’ve participated in all five Twitter campaigns to date by live-tweeting during the west coast broadcast but not in the GetGlue campaign, where fans check in to Fringe and the show’s sponsors — Nissan Leaf and Sprint — live during commercials. Fringe is topping the trending charts at GetGlue too on Friday nights, with over ten thousand checking in. The ongoing campaign helps decision-makers see how much reach the unmeasured Fringe fandom has coming up on discussions between broadcaster FOX and production company Warner Bros TV about whether or not to renew the cult show for a fifth and final season.

Season Four began dramatically with one of the show’s trio of main characters — Peter Bishop — erased from existence and the absence of Joshua Jackson, the actor who plays him, from his hometown. See my YVRShoots series post Where is Peter Bishop? He returned to existence with a big splash at Reiden Lake in the Fall but as a stranger to his beloved Olivia Dunham played by Anna Torv and to his “father” Walter Bishop played by John Noble. See my YVRShoots series post Here is Peter Bishop. Peter remembers them but they don’t remember him in this altered timeline. Are they not his Olivia and his Walter?

We still don’t know about this Olivia and Walter but it was wonderful to catch a glimpse of the Fringe trio acting more like themselves this week at a CBC Vancouver shoot for an upcoming Spring episode, along with junior Fringe agent Astrid Farnsworth played by Jasika Nicole.

Fringe’s fourth season is divided into three acts — the Fall, Winter and Spring episodes. When World Series baseball on FOX unexpectedly pre-empted the eighth episode showrunners planned as their big Fall Finale it hurt the dramatic arc of the show and disappointed viewers.

So the Fall Finale became the Winter Premiere. In Back to Where You’ve Never Been, Peter Bishop decides to Read More »BIG READ: FRINGE is Trending in Vancouver and Worldwide

BIG READ: Making of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL

Published January 10, 2012 on Vancouver is Awesome

UPDATE: Worldwide Box Office — US$695 million.

The round-the-world spy thriller Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol has more Vancouver in it than the Mumbai running scene outside the Vancouver Convention Centre which I wrote about in my inaugural #YVRShoots series post and the Seattle post-mission team beer at a table on Granville Island which I covered in my second post about the Tom Cruise franchise filming here. Director Brad Bird filmed the last shot of Josh Holloway’s Budapest alley death scene in between the Dunsmuir and Georgia Viaducts; the Moscow scene where the team gets its Kremlin mission beneath the Burrard Bridge; the Kremlin explosion in a giant blue screen box at a gravel field near the Fraser River path; some of the Dubai sandstorm scene at an Arab market set at that same gravel field; the Sun Network station in Mumbai at a Richmond office park and the Mumbai automated car park scene inside a vast Vancouver Drydocks warehouse in North Vancouver.

Tom Cruise and his co-stars did go on location with Brad Bird and crew to Prague and Dubai before their final three months of shooting in Vancouver in late 2010 and early 2011, with the second unit filming scenes without cast in Moscow for a week and in Mumbai for the BMW coupe racing-through-the-streets sequence. Prague doubled for Budapest and Moscow, with some exceptions. And the Dubai showpiece of Cruise as IMF agent Ethan Hunt scaling and swinging from the tallest building in the world could not have be done anywhere but the actual Burj Khalifa.

Almost everything else happened here in studio at Canada Motion Picture Park or on location in the Vancouver area. It’s a credit to our crews and VFX expertise that the only things that give us away are glimpses of the Vancouver Convention Centre and a lit-up southwest False Creek between the Burrard and Granville Bridges.

So far, I’ve seen Mission Impossible -Ghost Protocol twice in theatres. Once to simply enjoy Brad Bird’s first big action movie with a non-animated cast and the second time to nail down as many of the Vancouver locations as possible. Despite my best efforts I’m sure I missed several.

The fourth in the Mission Impossible movie franchise opens with Josh Holloway as IMF agent Trevor Hanaway in Prague-as-Budapest trying to intercept a courier of a threat codenamed COBALT at a train station. Then we’re treated to Tom Cruise’s Moscow prison escape to the tune of Dean Martin’s Ain’t That a Kick in the Head, likely filmed here given the numerous Vancouver paparrazi shots of Cruise in his dirty white muscle shirt from prison. Post-escape Cruise meets his new team: Simon Pegg as newly promoted field agent Benji Dunn and Paula Patton as Hanaway’s team leader Jane Carter while they drive around in a Russian van. Read More »BIG READ: Making of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL

BIG READ: Tom Cruise Shooting for MISSION IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL

Published January 13, 2011 on VancouverisAwesome.com

I had heard that Tom Cruise does his own stunts and is absolutely fearless with fans but discounted both claims until last Friday night when Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (MI-4) turned the street outside the Vancouver Convention Centre into wedding procession traffic in Bangalore, India. Cruise ran very quickly through the vehicles and 350 Indian extras in take after take, at one point leaping over a car several times. And after midnight he walked straight into a scrum of fans watching the filming.

MI-4 rolled into Vancouver back at the beginning of December but Cruise proved elusive, spending most of his time filming in studio at Canada Motion Picture Park in Burnaby. Some wondered if MI-4 would do any big exterior shoots downtown. Then on Dec 16, an ad appeared in The Vancouver Sun calling for movie extras for Aries (MI-4’s working title) to depict a city in India in January.

On the first Monday of the new year, Cruise and co-star Simon Pegg (Star Trek) filmed a small scene under the Burrard Bridge. And that same day, MI-4 crew started prepping the VCC to look like Bangalore: attaching leaves to bare trees, unloading palm trees and affixing Indian signs & banners to the exterior. Buzz grew over the five days of prep that Cruise himself would be at the shoot, scheduled for the end of the week. (Simon Pegg was not in the India scenes, spending the day snow boarding at Grouse Mountain).

By 4 p.m. Friday, everything was in place from tuk tuks to saris for the star to do his own running stunt as spectators gathered in the bitter cold. Cruise took a detour to say hello on arrival. jogging on the spot to keep warm while some girls screamed in delight.

 

What amazed me was Cruise’s speed or as @jdcasa tweeted on #MI4: “He’s pretty spry for an old guy”.  Read More »BIG READ: Tom Cruise Shooting for MISSION IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL