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.
Andrew-Lee Potts later revealed in an interview that Connor Temple is in Vancouver to rectify something that went wrong and to warn Evan Cross and his team (sharp eyes will have spotted the ring on a chain around Connor’s neck, a spoiler from Primeval’s season five finale).
The cast seemed oh so serious and not that friendly when the cameras were rolling, but the exact opposite the rest of the time. Primeval’s Andrew-Lee Potts and Primeval New World’s Niall Matter kept cracking up on set, again and again. Danny Rahim joined in but something kept setting off the main duo.
That’s a bemused Primeval: New World co-showrunner Martin Wood on the left above. He directed the series premiere, which began filming on March 7th with some difficult stunts of a dead-drop fall from the roof of a downtown office tower in back-to-back night shoots. Our dead parachutist?
I didn’t find them on location until early evening of the following Monday, March 12th, in Stanley Park, after a west coast windstorm blew off a branch the size of a tree near set. Primeval: New World had staged a crime scene in the parking lot east of the Vancouver Rowing Club along the seawall and that’s where I spotted Niall Matter, Sara Canning and Danny Rahim below in the rainy gloom.
The next day, the Vancouver-as-Vancouver series filmed three different sequences at Harbour Green Park on the other side of Coal Harbour. The first sequence had Sara Canning’s predator control officer Dylan Weir on the upper plaza with a prosthetic parachutist’s body, flashing prop police cars and a crowd of fake lookyloos which included Andrew-Lee Potts’s Connor Temple.
That’s Tom Butler, The Killing’s Seattle Mayor Lesley Adams, on the left as another Predator Control Officer. Somehow I don’t think Sara Canning’s Weir is long for this group as I’ve never seen iher in this unifrom since. The Primeval New World team wears cool jackets not jump suits.
[Deleted photo I incorrectly identifed]
In the next sequence of the day, Andrew Lee Pott’s Connor Temple warns Niall Matter’s Evan Cross and then Cross confers with Dylan Weir and Rendell. In between takes, the cast and crew had a lot of fun together.
So I’ve been lucky to see and photograph shoots for three of Primeval: New World’s thirteen episodes in recognizable Vancouver locations from Stanley Park/Coal Harbour to the Olympic Village to UBC’s Thunderbird Arena. Unless I hear of them setting up somewhere else iconic like the Olympic Cauldron, I don’t think I’ll get another chance to see Vancouver’s own “genius dino/anomaly hunters” on location this season. It’ll be great to see them and the computer-generated dinos they hunt on screen.
Primeval: New World’ launches this fall on SPACE in Canada.