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.
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.
Hey Now! That’s Jeffrey Tambor, better known as Hank Kingsley on the Larry Sanders Show and Oscar Bluth on Arrested Development, waving at me from the Psych set in the 6100 block of Boulevard in Kerrisdale today. I’m not often starstruck but I scrambled to remember just one of his catch phrases, experienced brain freeze and ended up giving him a feeble wave back.
On tonight’s Eureka, Allison Blake’s snobby brother Marcus comes to town to meet his new Sheriff brother-in-law, Jack Carter. Fun fact: Marcus, who is prejudiced against “dumb people”, is played by Salli Richardson-Whitfield’s real-life husband Dondre Whitfield.
Marcus meets Colin Ferguson’s Sheriff Carter and Trevor Jackson’s Kevin chasing and trying to catch what will turn out to be a crazy pair of robotic legs after computer-generated effects. During the filming in downtown Chilliwack dressed as Eureka, a stunt woman in a green skinsuit and a crew member carrying a mannequin leg played this extremely agile lower torso. I can’t wait to see it.
Of course this is how the supercilious Marcus meets Carter: lying pinned to the grass by those robotic crazy legs wrapped around his neck.
After a two-season investigation into the murder of Seattle teen Rosie Larsen, The Killing finally revealed who did it on last night’s season finale. Our dynamic detective duo Sarah Linden and Stephen Holder had a tough time of it in the second season as they closed in on the killer: starting with Joel Kinnaman’s Holder finding out he’d been set up to frame Seattle mayoral candidate Darren Richond with a doctored toll booth photo and then getting beat up by thugs at the Wapi Eagle casino and left for dead, while Mireille Enos’s Linden ditched her fiance, was suspended, lost custody of her son, got bashed on the head at the casino and committed to a psych ward for a day.
On the lam from their own Seattle police force, Linden & Holder strike an on-the-spot deal with Mayor Lesley Adams on Day 24 of the investigation to let them pursue two suspects (whom Holder dubbed “Donny and Marie”) from the rival Richmond campaign: campaign manager Jamie Wright and campaign adviser Gwen Eaton. After an interview with Wright’s grandfather, Kinnaman’s Holder is subjected to one more indignity while walking back to his beater car in an alley off Victory Square. The dreaded Vancouver rain tower.
Of course it wouldn’t be The Killing if the leads didn’t get completely soaked from time to time but I bet Joel Kinnaman regrets joking to EW magazine last year that one of the privileges of going to Swedish acting school is doing two months of rain tower. He was doused in take after take by a spectacular deluge, so spectacular I had to strip out some of the fake rain from my photographs so that you could see him.
Yet the second season has been nowhere near as damp or morose as the first thanks to Kinnaman’s Holder, who has single-handedly turned The Killing from a dead serious drama into an occasional dramedy. Apart from last night’s finale of course, which turned out to be nothing but sombre for Linden & Holder. Don’t read any further if you don’t want to know who killed Rosie Larsen.
So we have some scoop on what director Neill Blomkamp’s latest sci-fi project Elysium is about, after Collider.com got its hands on an advance sceening ticket which had a detailed plot synopsis. I’d worked out some of the story last summer during the film’s three-month shoot in Vancouver, which I wrote about in my YVRShoots series, but there is still a lot we don’t know.
Elysium turns out to be the name of the vast, luxurious space station constructed by Armadyne where the very rich live in the year 2159 (want-ads for Armadyne popped up at last year’s Comic-Con in San Diego, the start of a viral campaign for the movie). The rest of us– the 99% if you will — live on the over-populated, ruined planet Earth below. A bald, buff Matt Damon is Max (link to first official photo), who takes on the mission to bring equality to these polarized classes. He’s going up against Jody Foster as Minister Delacourt [corrected], a hard-line govenment official, who will stop at nothing to enforce anti-immigration laws and preserve the grandiose lifestyle of the citizens of Elysium in space (Foster returned for reshoots this spring but not Damon).
Since Matt Damon was seen filming scenes in blue workmen’s garb [corrected] last summer at Vancouver Technical School, Riverview Hospital and out in Delta, could this be how Max is forced to take on the mission? And could this be how Max will save his own life? The Grouse Grinder also spent weeks filming at a mansion facade and temporarily-planted tropical garden on the vast gravel field at Kent and Boundary in Vancouver. The blue rectangles are thought to be a spaceship, the fake palm trees have no fronds, the small piles of sand seem to represent a manmade beachs and huge blue screens ringed the set. Interior scenes were filmed at the other end of Vancouver in a real-life mansion at 51st and Macdonald behind Jurassic Park-sized hedges. I’m now wondering if this mansion is on the Elysium space station, not on Earth as I originally thought.
So Greek gods are running rampant in modern America, waging war and fathering children, like young Percy Jackson who discovers in the first film adaption, The Lightning Thief. that the father he never knew is the Greek god Poseidon. In the second of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians franchise, Percy and pals set out to retrieve the golden fleece in the Sea of Monsters to save their beloved Camp Half-Blood, the summer camp where children of the gods are trained and protected.
It’s been fun to watch some of the filming of the sequel these past two months, especially on the Camp Half-Blood sets in Robert Burnaby Park in Burnaby, built on the tennis courts and in the adjoining woods. Teen fans of Logan Lerman, who stars as Percy Jackson, tracked him all over the city on Twitter and flooded Tumblr with hundreds of photos-with, taken mainly in that park in May.
Joining Logan Lerman in this series of adventures based on Greek mythology are Brandon T. Jackson as his best pal and protector Grover Underwood, a satyr who hides his goat horns under toques and his goat legs with crutches; Alexandra Daddario as Annabeth Chase, daughter of the Greek god Athena; and Douglas Smith as his newly-discovered half-brother Tyson, a very tall, one-eyed cyclops.
As in the first film, the fun for adults is the casting of the Greek god parents. Geek God Nathan Fillion plays Greek god Hermes, the god of thieves, travellers and messengers, dressed as a UPS courier in shorts. Here he is peeking out of the prop The UPS Store set they built in late April at the corner of Pender and Abbott in downtown Vancouver. Percy Jackson and pals cross Pender (dressed as Monroe St NW in the District of Columbia), enter The UPS store and line up at the counter to pick up a package which apparently gives them what they need to head into the Sea of Monsters to find the golden fleece.
For once, the fans gathered near set weren’t clamouring for Logan Lerman. They wanted “Captain Tightpants”, as one Fillion fan yelled out. Another got her Firefly DVD signed as Fillion graciously took time to meet and sign for fans three times during that downtown shoot.
In the upcoming Vancouver-as-Vancouver series Primeval: New World, primeval creatures enter our city through temporal anomolies, aka time portals, and create havoc. This week a winged creature is terrorizing the University of British Columbia in and around the Doug Mitchell Thunderbird Sports Arena (venue for Vancouver 2010 Olympics hockey and Paralympics sledge hockey). Crew setting up a crime scene in the Thunderbird Parkade last Friday told me it’s some kind of flying dinosaur [Update: it’s our cheezy-lovin’ Leggy from the grow-op escaping from a government facility]. Of course I didn’t see the creature, which will be computer-generated in post-production, but I did spy Dan Payne and other military actors arriving on the west side of the Thunderbird Arena on Friday morning and evacuating student extras on the east side on Monday morning.
Like the original British series Primeval, the Vancouver spinoff has a team of smart minds and animal experts who battle these creatures. Ours is led by Niall Matter as rich Vancouver software genius Evan Cross, seen here arriving at the Thunderbird Arena with co-star Sara Canning as predatory animal attack behaviour expert Dylan Weir.
of the investigation when the motormouth provided a distraction
