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Susan Gittins

Longtime mainstream media (MSM) journalist and author Susan Gittins began writing about and photographing Vancouver’s many film and TV location shoots in the summer of 2010 after the Winter Olympics put the city and its beauty on the world stage. Movies and TV series often showcase the Vancouver area in similar fashion. Vancouver is Awesome commissioned her YVRShoots series in the fall of 2010 and it ran regularly for three years. She launched her own daily YVRShoots blog in the spring of 2012.

Spoilers from #Supernatural Season Seven Finale Scenes in Gastown – Updated

It seems Bobby Singer is still angry with Dick Roman, the Leviathon CEO, for shooting him dead. Supernatural filmed a season finale scene last night in Gastown of Jim Beaver as Bobby staring at a Dick Roman news item on an array of flat screen TVs for sale in the window of an electronics store set.

Across Carrell Street outside the Blarney Stone, a dozen fans watched the filming, spinning theories about what we were seeing. We think it’s ghost Bobby not a come-back-to-life Bobby, but it’s only a guess. We’ll have to wait for the season finale to air to find out.

In between takes, some watched the Vancouver Canucks lose their first playoff game on the big screen inside the pub. I retreated to the back of the Coffee Bar at 12 Water Street to warm up, dry out, and use wifi. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a handsome man in blue come out of the Boneta Restaurant to talk on his phone in the inner courtyard. It was Misha Collins, dining where Supernatural had set up a holding area for background performers in the late shoot, even though crew said he had no scenes that night.

Later he and his companion walked past the electronics store set to chat with crew and Jim Beaver. And as only I can do, I took a photo of Misha Collins where I’m the only who knows he’s in it (he’s one of the shadowy figures on the right).

While it was great to see Jim Beaver on set again, we were hoping for the return of something else too — the Impala. Read More »Spoilers from #Supernatural Season Seven Finale Scenes in Gastown – Updated

Stephen Amell is Arrow for TV pilot ARROW in Vancouver

Arrow, based on DC Comics The Green Arrow, is one hot TV pilot. And by all accounts, Stephen Amell is one hot Arrow in this more Jason Bourne-like and less Smallville-ish production. Like The Dark Knight’s re-imagined Batman, Arrow’s vigilante superhero fights crime with martial arts and technology plus the special skill of archery. “Working theory: The most expedient way to shoot a show where I’m an expert at archery is to become an expert an archery,” Amell tweeted in late February. And he must have hit the gym too. “You should see what’s under that hood……you’ve never seen ripped until you’ve seen this guy,” tweeted Arrow fight coordinator James Bamford.

None of my photographs do justice to how much Stephen Amell resembles a Jason Bourne-type action star. This is the closest I came with Amell in character as his secret identity Oliver Queen, crouched in Gastown before filming a take with Katie Cassidy as his former love Dinah “Laurel” Lance.

Pre-production set up on the same lot near a Burnaby Skytrain station that served as a Smallville permanent set for years. Filming on the Arrow pilot started on March 10th inside the Terminal City Ironworks complex in east Vancouver. The next morning, I missed an exterior scene of Oliver Queen jumping over the gate at the TCI entrance on Victoria Drive, but did spot the Oliver green arrow production sign on a walkby.

The next day, March 12th, Arrow set up at the foot of Gore Avenue in the Downtown Eastside during a wild west coast windstorm. Background performers dressed as homeless street peoople huddled around a fake fire and tried to keep their costumes intact in the wind. Stephen Amell and Colin Donnell, as his best friend and trustafarian Tommy Merlyn, were more sheltered, filming scenes inside Merlyn’s ride, a Mercedes 2012 SLS AMG ,with two wings and cockpit, as the ad says. Tents almost went airborne and Amell and Donnell looked like they were finally feeling the cold while waiting for their ride back to circus.

Read More »Stephen Amell is Arrow for TV pilot ARROW in Vancouver

NBC Pilot MIDNIGHT SUN Filmed in Squamish as Alaska

It’s not the first time Squamish has played Alaska for American TV. NBC pilot Midnight Sun, which Deadline.com says is getting some solid early buzz, spent much of last month filming in Squamish as Alaska.

This thriller about an FBI cult specialist investigating the mysterious disappearance of a group living on a commune in Squamish as Dugan, Alaska, stars Julia Stiles (the Bourne trilogy) as the cult specialist Leah Kafka, whose investigation uncovers a larger conspiracy, and Titus Welliver (Lost’s Man in Black) as cult leader Bennett Maxwell, the charistmatic and manipulative head of Midnight Sun.

I came close to seeing some of the filming of the Midnight Sun pilot, but arrived a day or two after they’d wrapped at the Squamish dock and then found them a couple more times at inaccessible locations. Luckily Michael Raymond-James, who co-stars as an Alaskan lawyer and second-in-command of the Dugan Police, is a tweeter and kept a sort-of running set diary with photos attached.

The cast did a network table read on March 8th. Then three days later, Raymond-James tweeted, “Prep is over. The hands have been shook, the drinks have been drunk. Tomorrow, we start shooting. Boom”. It looks like Midnight Sun started filming the pilot on the Squamish dock, judging from a photo which Raymond-James captioned “Look at where I go to work”. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get up to Squamish until Friday, March 16th, just missing the shoot there.

As you can see from the fresh snow above, the weather wasn’t co-operating much with the production. Glacier Air at the Squamish Municipal airport tweeted on March 14th about Midnight Sun not getting the sun they wanted to film a scene with a Beech 18 plane. The attached video showed a serious snow squall in progress. On March 16th, the day I was looking for Midnight Sun at the Squamish dock, someone from the crew tweeted a photo of a green screen Beech 18 scene, announcing “Today we get to fly!”

I returned to Squamish the following Monday, March 19th, spotting Midnight Sun’s GEP Pro production signs on the drive up the Sea to Sky highway, just past Lions Bay. Midnight Sun was filming in a private gravel pit, with nothing to see except a beautiful view of Anvil Island and a couple of prop Dugan Police suburbans parked nearby.

Michael Raymond-James had settled into on-location routine by then, tweeting “In my life me Tweeties, I’ve drank with rogues [sic] and revolutionaries. And now I can also say that I’ve done laundry in Squamish, BC.” Read More »NBC Pilot MIDNIGHT SUN Filmed in Squamish as Alaska

ABC TV Pilot RED WIDOW About Russian Mob – Updated

ABC pilot Red Widow, inspired by a popular Dutch TV series, is about a San Francisco mobster’s widow forced to replace her husband as head of what appears to be a Russian crime syndicate, judging from the filming at Lana Lou’s restaurant dressed as Cafe Rossiya in Vancouver’s downtown east side last month.

Australian Radha Mitchell stars as the widow Marta who takes her mobster husband’s place to protect her family, with Sterling Beaumon and Jacob Salvati as her sons and Erin Moriarty as her daughter. Luke Goss (Hellboy II) plays bodyguard to her mob father Andrei Lazarev, a bodyguard who is then assigned to look after her and the kids. Lee Tergesen (Oz) plays a foot soldier in the crime syndicate and Suleka Mathew (Hawthorne) is Marta’s best friend Dina, while Jaime Ray Newman is Marta’s younger sister Kat.

Read More »ABC TV Pilot RED WIDOW About Russian Mob – Updated

Going Numb on THE KILLING Day Sixteen

Joel Kinnaman’s conspiracy patsy Stephen Holder goes numb in epic fashion in The Killing’s third episode of the second season: scaring his nephew, beating up one of his old dealers, having sex in a car and then walking through oncoming traffic on what looks like Vancouver’s Georgia Viaduct (the red S on top of the Scotiabank tower is a giveaway).

This is where Mireillie Enos’s Sarah Linden — now back as lead detective on the Rosie Larsen murder case — finds Holder, having spent Day Sixteen of the investigation methodically backtracking what he has done or not done during her brief absence. She asks a uniformed police officer what happened to her warrant for a client list from the Beau Soleil computer servers, the on-line escort service sixteen-year-old Rosie Larsen worked for. It turns out Mark Moses’s new Lieutenant has obstructed her with red tape. While she’s waiting for the warrant, she goes to the Larsen house with a photograph of the manga tattoo from the arm of Rosie Larsen’s mysterious bicycling companion in a video. She’s confronted by a hostile Stan Larsen unwilling to look at anything until the police tell him what they’ve discovered about Rosie’s pink, bedazzled backpack dropped on his doorstep at the end of Day Fourteen.

That brings to Linden to just-retired Lieutenant Oakes’s boat moored somewhere on the Fraser River to retrieve the backpack which Holder entered into evidence. She quickly realizes that this is not Rosie Larsen’s backpack and that Holder must have made a switch, calling him to say: “I know what you did with the backpack…we need to talk..call me back.” Back at the station, she re-watches the video of Rosie Larsen on her bike for the umpteenth time. The uniformed police officer interrupts to tell her that he went to serve her Beau Soleil warrant at the shoe place but there was a fire there that morning.

Sarah Linden gets out of her car at the arsoned shoe store, filmed in Vancouver’s Chinatown early this year, saying, “Seattle PD. Were the computers damaged?” Told there were no computers, she squints around in Linden fashion, spying some security cameras on the street.

This was the first time I’d seen Mireille Enos filming on location for season two. She is so different from her character, quick with a smile and happy in her life, as you can see below in my photograph of her and a crew member.

The next scene in Numb is of Brent Sexton’s Stan Larsen picking up his two boys at school, only to discover that shady crime figure and Larsen’s former boss Janek Kovarsky has been by to visit them. I photographed Brent Sexton in character as Stan Larsen filming this scene at Vancouver’s Lord Strathcona Read More »Going Numb on THE KILLING Day Sixteen