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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.

BIG READ: EUREKA Series Finale

Published September 19, 2011 on Vancouver is Awesome

The fourth season of life in the charmingly-eccentric and scientifically-dysfunctional town of Eureka ends with a big emotional cliffhanger tonight on the Syfy network in the U.S. We will have to wait three more weeks in Canada to start seeing the back half of season four on the SPACE channel. And the fifth and final season of Eureka won’t air until sometime next year in either country (apart from the animated Christmas episode this December). That’s why it feels so strange to write about or show anything of the Eureka series finale, which wrapped filming in Vancouver before the Labour Day weekend. Everything is a potential spoiler.

A month ago, Eureka crew transformed two blocks of Wellington Street in Chilliwack into the Main Street of their fictional town for the very last time: erecting the large Sheriff’s Office and Cafe Diem facades, adding the fake bronze statue/fountain of Archimedes and putting their own signage on the Teddy Bear Dreams clothing store (the owner told me Eureka star Salli Richardson-Whitfield bought several items there over the years). Production also set up running tabs at two downtown Chilliwack institutions: the Decade Coffee House and Sticky’s Candy, where a young salesgirl showed me the empty vats of ice cream consumed by Eureka crew in a day’s filming.

Cast and crew seemed just as verklempt at that last shoot in Chilliwack as the fans who’d come to say goodbye. I saw Salli Richardson-Whitfield hugging the Eureka stunt coordinator and Tembi Locke snapping photos with her camera phone of her TV husband Joe Morton. One of the Eureka producers brought his fancy DSLR to play set photographer, posing Colin Ferguson and Salli Richardson-Whitfield on a bench ahead of their big scene together. Director Matt Hastings couldn’t resist photobombing that beautifully-staged shot, which made everyone laugh and then cry.

Laughter and tears. Everything about that day in Chilliwack seemed bittersweet. Syfy had renewed and then cancelled Eureka earlier in August, belatedly coughing up enough money to film this last-minute wrap-up episode. Read More »BIG READ: EUREKA Series Finale

BIG READ: Cancer Dramedy 50/50 with Joseph Gordon-Levitt & Seth Rogen

Published September 5, 2011 on Vancouver is Awesome.

Cancer dramedy 50/50, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the twenty-something cancer patient given 50/50 odds of survival and Vancouver’s own Seth Rogen as his horndog best friend, makes its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival next Monday — with wide release at the end of the month. Filmed here after the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, this small $8-million budget movie already has a reputation from advance screenings of charming people with laughs and then making them bawl like little children.

Seth Rogen developed and produced this buddy comedy, inspired by the true story of his comedy-writer friend Will Reiser’s extensive treatment after being diagnosed with a rare form of cancer six years ago. In real life and fiction, the two pals dealt with it the only way they knew how — through humour. Yet Reiser’s script doesn’t shy away from the more gruesome aspects of cancer like hair loss, chemotherapy and prematurely facing one’s own mortality — both the movie poster and trailer feature a buzzed-about scene of Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Inception) shaving his head.

Set in Seattle, the film also features Bryce Dallas Howard (in town this weekend to see her husband Seth Gabel of Fringe) as the girlfriend who can’t deal with her boyfriend’s cancer; Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air) as the therapist who grows into a relationship with her cancer patient; and Anjelica Huston as his worried mother. And if you’re looking for local actors, Matt Frewer and SGU: Stargate Universe alumni Julia Benson and Peter Kelamis are in some of the scenes.

I missed 50/50’s original five-week shoot in 2010 when the movie was called I’m with Cancer (later changed to Live With It and finally 50/50) but got to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt do reshoots of running scenes near Victory Square when he and Seth Rogen returned to the city for a day last November 1st.

The reshoots started that grey November day with Joseph Gordon-Levitt running along the seawall in Stanley Park near Lumberman’s Arch. Read More »BIG READ: Cancer Dramedy 50/50 with Joseph Gordon-Levitt & Seth Rogen

BIG READ: Where is Peter Bishop?

Published August 30, 3011 on Vancouver is Awesome

Friday night delayed-viewing hit Fringe did something unprecedented with its third season finale: it made Peter Bishop, one of its trio of main characters, cease to exist and asked Joshua Jackson, the actor who plays him, not to appear in the show for an unspecified amount of time in the fourth season filming now.

It appears much has changed since Peter Bishop averted the apocalyptic future of season three and created a bridge where Fringe’s two warring parallel universes could cross over and interact. Early episodes of season four are said to focus on what the lives of his beloved Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) and “father” Walter Bishop (John Noble) , as well as their alternate universe dopplegangers Fauxlivia (also Torv) and Walternate (also Noble), would be like without him. Lives that are not necessarily worse in the two universes, just different, except for Walter, who is a very sad man without Peter, as you can see in the photo below of Torv and Noble filming a scene of the two of them sitting on the back of an ambulance.

FOX began promoting the upcoming Fringe season with a sublimal teaser which spelled out “Where is Peter Bishop?” backwards and there have been several more teasers since, as well as promos for the aptly-named premiere, Neither Here Nor There, the latest of which appeared last night during a FOX commercial break. And of course the Twitter-savvy Fringe has its own hashtag #WhereisPeterBishop?

Filming of the season four opener began in mid-July and included a stint inside the old Terminal City Ironworks compound in east Vancouver where the two universes overlapped in last season’s twisty finale. Props crew were inside for several days but what they built and what Fringe was filming remains a secret as does almost everything about the premiere, except that it’s big (Observers spootted on set along with Hartford police car). I had speculated Joshua Jackson snuck into town for this on July 21st until I read a report that he’d been briefly hospitalized in Santa Monica that same Thursday for an allergic reaction.

Fringe, needing someone to fill the gap left by Peter Bishop, did upgrade Seth Gabel to series regular. Gabel, who plays Fringe Division agent Lincoln Lee in the alternate universe, reportedly will spend more time as original universe Lincoln Lee and his thick black glasses this season.Read More »BIG READ: Where is Peter Bishop?

BIG READ: Filming Christmas in Summer

Published August 22, 2011 on Vancouver is Awesome

It sounds crazy to film Christmas TV in the summer heat but it happens every year. Of the more than a dozen Christmas-themed TV movies expected to air in the U.S. this December at least three filmed in Vancouver in July and August. And last week in Chilliwack, Syfy series Eureka filmed real scenes for its animated season five holiday episode called Do You See What I See?, laying out snow on a Christmas-decorated-to-the-max Wellington Street very early Thursday morning.

It took Eureka crew a couple of hours last Wednesday night to build Christmas, unloading trees with lights, garlands, candy canes, nutcrackers and a large snowman. The Euripedes statue/fountain in front of the Sheriff’s Office got its own Santa hat. After it was all done, I watched them shoot a key scene of Colin Ferguson as Sheriff Jack Carter, Kavan Smith as robot Deputy Andy and Chris Gautier as Cafe Diem chef gathered around a bright red holographic projector designed to create a faux winter wonderland on the street. Unfortunately, as often happens in Eureka, something goes array and thesuper photon generator sends a kaleidoscopic wave of holographic overlay from a video game that envelops the town leaving all its inhabitants animated. If you thought Eureka couldn’t get any quirkier, imagine your favourite characters as Looney-Toon cartoons, claymation or anime, as well as the more regular CGI. Apparently, our cartoon heroes have until Christmas morning to reverse it or remain animated forever.

Chris Parnell of Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock fame reprises his role from last year’s Christmas special as Dr. Noah Drummer, part of a star-studded roster of guest stars. Edward James Olmos of Battlestar Galactica voices a sled dog pack leader who befriends Deputy Andy and Matt Frewer of Alice and Max Headroom plays an animated version of himself as a polar bear who befriends Jo Lupo. Read More »BIG READ: Filming Christmas in Summer

BIG READ: SUPERNATURAL in Gastown

Published August 15, 2011 on Vancouver is Awesome

Gastown played host to Supernatural’s Winchester Brothers and their signature black Impala late last week for an epic two-day shoot which went past curfew hours on both Thursday and Friday nights. Since the show’s two stars, Jensen Ackles and Jared Padelecki, don’t film downtown that often, this ranked as a big event in the Supernatural world. Local fans mobilized on Twitter for the chance to see their boys filming scenes of season seven’s fourth episode, Defend Your Life, apparently set in Dearborn, Michigan.

Filming notices posted in the impacted areas of Gastown and the downtown Eastside said the City of Vancouver had given Supernatural permission to film late both nights based on the positive results of a poll conducted in the neighbourhood. Around 10 p.m. on Thursday night, I watched crew hoist a film light from a genie parked outside Incendio’s, a light that would illuminate a block of Alexander street to film a scene of a vehicle chasing a pedestrian west towards the Gassy Jack statue and up onto the sidewalk on the north side. Suddenly a man with waist-length grey hair stormed past me, shouting “What is that noise?” I watched him argue heatedly with police and crew long after the light was up and quiet. I can only imagine the ruckus that happened at 1 a.m. when filming was expected to wrap, the light lowered and equipment packed into trucks. I might feel more sympathetic if it was my neighbourhood, but I was there to photograph the spectacle of Gastown lit up.

On Friday night, Supernatural had permission to film until 2:30 a.m. This time the big light was parked in Chinatown and hoisted closer to 10:30 p.m. to what looked like ten stories above street level. From there, it shone like moonlight on Carrall Street two blocks north to film another scene of a pedestrian being chased by a vehicle, this time into an alley. As I walked towards the closed-off, wetted-down 300 block of Carrall Street, I spied Supernatural’s smoke machines filling it with fake smoke. As actor Jim Beaver once explained about the show’s beautiful lighting: “Its texture is due to expertly placed lights seen through fake smoke. Lovely to breathe day in, day out”. That’s a bit of sarcasm. I can attest to its acrid, foul stench and wouldn’t want to be the crew guy who sat next to one on a Carrall Street bench. By the time I got there, quite a large crowd had gathered at the north end of the block near the Rainier Hotel to gawk at the crime scene with yellow tape, a Dearborn police car and Wayne Country Coroner’s van. I left around 11 p.m. before filming started but I expect the location only got rowdier, situated as it was on the edge of the Gastown party zone, less than half a block away from the Blarney Stone pub.

Supernatural actually began its two-day shoot in Gastown in the Blarney Stonemid-afternoon Thursday with four to five dozen extras inside. When I walked by I saw blacked-out windows for all interior scenes so I didn’t linger. I did plan to return for an exterior scenes with Jared Padalecki at the Rainier Hotel and Jensen Ackles in a suit buying flowers at Greenstems Floral on Abbott Street. Read More »BIG READ: SUPERNATURAL in Gastown

BIG READ: RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES Green Screen in Vancouver

Published August 11, 2011 on Vancouver is Awesome

Hail Caesar! Andy Serkis’s motion-capture performance as the chimpanzee Caesar in the mostly Vancouver-filmed Rise of the Planet of the Apes is nothing short of astonishing. I am now kicking myself for not stumbling on to any of the Apes location shoots last summer, especially the one on Hornby Street of digital apes scrambling down the marble facade of the YWCA Health & Fitness Centre, which happens to be my gym. That’ll teach me not to skip a workout.

Filming of Rise of the Apes began here in July last year before moving on to San Francisco and Hawaii. When you catch this reboot of the Planet of the Apes franchise in theatres you’ll see it does make for a decent game of spot the location. I didn’t do well, getting caught up in the story and forgetting to look for Vancouver area locations. A friend recognized the home of scientist Will Rodman (James Franco) and his Alzheimer-addled father Charles (John Lithgow) as a heritage house up behind the Mountain Equipment Co-op Store on Broadway. Crew filmed on that street for two weeks and recreated the interior of the house for more scenes in studio. This is the house where young Caesar grows up and Andy Serkis honoured the home owners by introducing himself to them.

I did spot the BCIT Aerospace and Technology Campus in Richmond in some of the exterior scenes of GEN-SYS, the lab where Will Rodman is using apes as test subjects to develop a cure for his father’s Alzheimers. And the Hornby Street location of apes rampaging through San Francisco after their escape from their “Ape Alcatraz” animal shelter, proved instantly recognizable, although I missed the anomoly of Canada Place in one of the camera shots looking north down to Burrard Inlet.

As for the climatic showdown of apes and men on the Golden Gate Bridge, most of it was filmed here with greenscreens on the huge gravel field at Kent and Boundary near the Fraser River path. Background performer Thomas C. Andrews tweeted to tell me of the five days he spent last summer running scared on that gravel, playing one of the many pedestrians/motorists trapped on the bridge. I don’t know how many days in total it took to film all the sequences in that showdown but here’s where I got lucky. Rise of the Planet of the Apes returned to Vancouver this spring to do some reshoots ahead of the movie’s opening this month. I photographed the greenscreens, Highway Patrol cars, the extras playing Highway Patrol officers and three of the stop-motion apes (see below). None of them look like Andy Serkis, but these three performers could have played some of the other lead apes, such as the chimp Koba and gorilla Buck.

Unlike the other Planet of the Apes movies, the apes in this one are not actors in makeup. Peter Jackson’s Weta Digtial created them digitally using time motion capture, which is what the orange square markings are for. From a distance I watched one of the men playing an ape bend over simian-style and scamper along the ground with his crutches. Read More »BIG READ: RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES Green Screen in Vancouver

BIG READ: ONCE UPON A TIME in Steveston Village

Published August 5, 2011 on Vancouver is Awesome

New American TV series Once Upon a Time is about two worlds: one set in fairy tales and another set in a New England town, with the more-than-100-years-old Steveston village standing in for Storybrooke, Maine. On Monday night last week, crew transformed Moncton Street in Steveston for filming the next day: boarding up and plastering newspapers on the windows of Nikka Fishing & Marine to make it look like a derelict Storybrooke Free Public Library; putting their own weathered signage like Storybrooke Hardware and Paint over Steveston Marine & Hardware on the side of a building; and erecting several other dirtied-up signs like Purbeck Shoe Store on the Steveston Drugs brick heritage building. This was all done to film scenes of Once Upon a Time lead Jennifer Morrsion (Cameron of House) walking on the boardwalks and crossing back and forth across Moncton Street for the second episode of the series.

The magical story of Once Upon a Time apparently begins in the pilot with the grand wedding of Prince Charming, played by Josh Dallas (Thor), and Snow White, played by Ginnifer Goodwin (Big Love), in a distant fairy tale world — filmed this spring in Vancouver with greenscreens and 200-plus fairy tale costumed extras. Meantime, in the world of present-day reality their daughter Emma Swan, played by Jennifer Morrison, has grown up without knowing her fairy tale parents, which goes a long way to explaining her profession as a kick-ass bail bonds collector in Boston. Things change when Henry, the son Emma gave up for adoption a decade earlier, finds her and begs her to come back with him to Storybrooke where he says fairy tale characters have been cursed to spend their lives in the real world without getting happy endings or even knowing their true identities. She drives there with Henry, played by Jared Gilmore (Bobby on Mad Men), in her yellow VW bug, where she meets some strangely familiar people and decides to stay awhile.

No one outside of production caught a glimpse of Once Upon a Time filming the fairy tale world scenes of the pilot, but a small crowd of people did watch Jennifer Morrison do a yellow-VW-bug-driving-scene on Seymour Street downtown in late March and then in early April, a smaller crowd watched her yellow-VW-bug arrival in Steveston as Storybrooke.

Created by Lost writers Eddy Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, Once Upon a Time should know how to mix reality and fantasy and cross between the two. The pilot cuts back and forth between the present world of Storybrooke and the past world of the Enchanted Forest Read More »BIG READ: ONCE UPON A TIME in Steveston Village

BIG READ: EUREKA’s Colin Ferguson Does Stunts in Chilliwack

Published July 28, 2011 on Vancouver is Awesome

Syfy’s summer hit series Eureka goes largely unnoticed filming here, even when it transforms Wellington Street in Chilliwack into the Main Street of Eureka, a remote Oregon town populated by geniuses and scientists whose inventions have a habit of going array and threatening everything nearby. So it was surprising to me how big this small town is at Comic-Con (the annual San Diego geek fest), where thousands of fans sang Happy Birthday to Eureka star Colin Ferguson last Friday afternoon as he filmed it on his flipcam.

Ferguson, who plays the relatively ordinary Sheriff Jack Carter who tries to contain whatever disasters Eureka’s brilliant scientists unleash each week, flew down to San Diego with other main cast last Thursday after spending all day Wednesday filming an episode in Chilliwack. Crew had brought their own grass, a fountain/statue of Euripedes, large Eureka Sheriff’s Office and Cafe Diem facades, an O2 bar, smart cars, Main Street and Euripedes street signs, Weather Predictor screens, Young Hover Drivers and 1-Hour Hologram Processing billboards and Eureka Hobby Expo and Craft Fair posters to transform two blocks of Wellington Street into the centre of a very eccentric fictional town. Ferguson even did his own stunts in scenes where he and young Trevor Jackson lept around trying to catch something we couldn’t see, possibly the leg of a floating woman enacted by a green-suited stunt performer.

Crew even mimicked the movement of a floating woman with a mannequin leg. Later the stunt coordinator demonstrated what would be a full-frontal collision between Ferguson and the green-suited stunt performer. After watching, Ferguson declared: “That’s funny. I want a cup.” No one had one but he shoved something makeshift down his pants anyway, joking with the stunt performer “We’re friends. We like each other, right?” The stunt went off without incident Read More »BIG READ: EUREKA’s Colin Ferguson Does Stunts in Chilliwack

BIG READ – Working the Comic Con Craziness in 2011 – Updated

Published July 21, 2011 on Vancouver is Awesome

How’s this for Comic-Con craziness? Twihards starting lining up outside the San Diego Convention Center three days early (on Monday) to be among the six thousand lucky enough to get into The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn 1 panel in Hall H, which took place just before lunchtime today. Breaking Dawn 1 was the first panel in Hall H so that Twihards couldn’t ruin Comic-Con like they usually do. What’s even more crazy? That the vampires and werewolves of the mainly Vancouver-shot Breaking Dawn 1 aren’t the most popular panel of the hundreds at Comic-Con 2011. Not even close. That honour belongs to the zombies of AMC TV series The Walking Dead.

Breaking Dawn 1 isn’t even among the most popular of Vancouver-filmed movies and TV series at Comic-Con, which has become less about big movies and more about cult television series in recent years. Locally-shot TV series Pscyh cracked the Top 25 most popular panels and Fringe, Eureka, Supernatural and Alcatraz are all in the Top 50. Breaking Dawn 1 and Underworld Awakening (the fourth in the movie franchise but only the third to star Kate Beckinsale and her vampire cat suit) barely made the Top 50 cut.

Psych presented today to standing-room-only, people-turned-away capacity, with Psych-os either dressed as pineapples or carrying them. Apparently series star James Roday (seen above directing a vampire-themed episode) improvised with a pineapple in the show’s premiere and there’s been one hidden in every episode since. Nominally a detective series, Psych knows how to play to a Comic-Con crowd, with several episodes in its sixth season (now filming in Vancouver) crossing over into genre stuff like vampires, super heroes and Star Trek. In a real casting coup, the original Captain Kirk — William Shatner — plays the father of one of the main cast in an episode filmed Read More »BIG READ – Working the Comic Con Craziness in 2011 – Updated