Skip to content

Vancouver Public Library

Occupy Vancouver-Style Tent City on CONTINUUM – Updated

Continuum crew set up an Occupy Vancouver-style Tent City on the CBC Vancouver plaza in March to do two days of filming for episode six, Time’s Up. On the first day of shooting, a peaceful protest rally against fake oil company Exotrol escalates to violence with prop Vancouver Mounted Police on the scene to control the fake rioters throwing prop bricks. [Update: Rachel Nichols’s Kiera Cameron and Victor Webster’s Carlos Fonnegra arrive before the violence and cop-from-the-future Kiera sees her first horse.]

I blame the terrorists-from-the-future Liber8 for inflaming these present-day dissenters, who carry handmade signs saying things like — I’ll Believe Corporations Are People When Texas Executes One (my favourite); Stop the Pipe Line; Fish Can’t Breathe Oil; Oil & Water Do Not Mix;, My Mom Taught Me to Share; Save Mother Earth; It’s Time to Think Outside the Barrel; Your Fault My Problem;  and No Fracking Way!

Read More »Occupy Vancouver-Style Tent City on CONTINUUM – Updated

BIG READ: THE KILLING Reveals Who Killed Rosie Larsen

Published June 18, 2012 on Vancouver is Awesome

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.

Holder’s funniest moment had to be the one on Day 22 of the investigation when the motormouth provided a distractionRead More »BIG READ: THE KILLING Reveals Who Killed Rosie Larsen

CONTINUUM’s Rachel Nichols and Victor Webster Filming at the Vancouver Public Library for 1×03

In tonight’s hit Vancouver-as-Vancouver sci-fi series Continuum, our VPD detective duo pay a visit to the iconic Vancouver Public Library as part of their investigation into a series of murders in which victims have been drained of endocrine fluid in an effort to save the leader of terrorist group Liber8. Here’s a link to a promo photo of Rachel Nichols’s cop-from-the-future Keira Cameron and Victor Webster’s present-day-cop Carlos Fonnegra examining a corpse. And below are some of my behind-the-scenes photos of Nichols and Webster filming scenes with the medical examiner for episode three’s Wasting Time at the central library, with a prop Vancouver Police squad car and VPD extras in the background.

Originally called Out of Time, Continuum is about a future police officer Kiera Cameron who gets swept up in an escape by terrorist group Liber8 and travels back in time with them from Vancouver in the year 2077 to Vancouver in the year 2012, where she partners with detective Carlos Fonnegra to stop Liber8 from changing the future from the past.

Read More »CONTINUUM’s Rachel Nichols and Victor Webster Filming at the Vancouver Public Library for 1×03

CTV Orders New Vancouver-Set Procedural MOTIVE to Series

The yet-to-be-cast 13-episode CTV series Motive, about a “feisty female Vancouver detective” solving murders, is the latest TV drama series to let Vancouver play itself. We’ve gone from zero to four in a very short time–  possibly five if Endgame is resurrected.

Why now? Some credit the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games for making our city “cool” and recognizable the world over.

While CBC’s hit adventure series Arctic Air mainly films its Yellowknife interiors on permanent sets in Aldergrove and its exteriors in Yellowknife, when the action is in our city, as it was in the wonderfully-titled episode Vancouver is Such a Screwed-Up City, then Vancouver plays itself.

And Showcase’s out-of-the-box hit Continuum features not one but two Vancouvers. In the part sci-fi, part procedural Continuum, a future police officer travels back in time from Vancouver in the year 2077 to Vancouver in the year 2012, swept up in an escape by a group of terrorists — Liber8 – who plan to change the future from the past by targeting the corporations that will come to rule the world. Here’s Rachel Nichols’s officer-from-the-future at the Vancouver Public Library.

Over at SPACE’s upcoming sci-fi and procedural series Primeval: New World, we can look forward to seeing apartment-building-sized dinosaurs and other primeval creatures rampaging through our neighbourhoods like Stanley Park, Coal Harbour and the Olympic Village. Read More »CTV Orders New Vancouver-Set Procedural MOTIVE to Series

BIG READ: Vancouver’s CONTINUUM & PRIMEVAL: NEW WORLD at First Fan Expo Vancouver

Published April 17, 2012 on Vancouver is Awesome

Imagine two Vancouver-as-Vancouver TV series filming here, with B.C. Place stadium, the central Vancouver Public Library, Woodwards’ revolving “W”, Granville Island, Stanley Park and other local landmarks as themselves. It’s so rare for us to have one Vancouver-set series filming here, far less two. So come to our city’s first Fan Expo this Saturday, where you’ll get sneak peeks of both, as well as the chance to meet the showrunners and cast.

Continuum is about some kind of future officer named Kiera Cameron who travels back in time from Vancouver in the year 2077 to Vancouver in the year 2012, chasing a group of terrorists who plan to change the future from the past. You may have seen some of the spectacular-future-downtown-skyline teasers on Showcase, where the 10-episode series debuts in late May. Or the 2077/2012 split skylines on the Continuum show poster.

Continuum stars Rachel Nichols as Kiera Cameron, who joins the local Vancouver police force with Victor Webster as her 2012 detetective partner. You can see Nichols as her character filming in Vancouver with the Woodwards “W” in the background in a promo photo from the show. I’ve photographed Continuum filming at Victory Square, outside and inside the central Vancouver Public Library, The Centre and CBC Vancouver so far with prop Vancouver Police cars and VPD extras alongside real ones. Below is my photo of Nichols exiting an unmarked police car with the Vancouver Public Library reflected in the windshield. And below that is my photo of  Nichols and her co-star Victor Webster filming in a snowstorm at Victory Square. It will be a veritable Vancouver-palooza in each episode.

Read More »BIG READ: Vancouver’s CONTINUUM & PRIMEVAL: NEW WORLD at First Fan Expo Vancouver

BIG READ: Tribute to Axed Series as New TV Season Begins

Published July 7, 2011 on Vancouver is Awesome

Filming of the American network Fall TV season got underway this week around North America. Here in Vancouver, Supernatural star Jensen Ackles began directing a season seven episode of the Friday night show. And crew of the other locally-filmed Friday-night-hit Fringe prepped for the start of filming season four next Thursday: scouting locations and rebuilding sets in studio. So this seems an appropriate time to pay tribute to the Vancouver-shot network series not returning to our TV screens in 2011-12.

Sci-fi series V, cancelled in June after two seasons on ABC, couldn’t have been a better series to watch filming here. I will miss it most of all the axed series for its many downtown shoots and couldn’t-be-nicer-to-the-public cast led by its lead actor Elizabeth Mitchell. On the same day last summer that I photographed Mitchell (below) as FBI agent Erica Evans filming at the Vancouver Art Gallery, a photo from an office tower above of dozens of V dead-body extras lying on the grass at Portal Park made the cover of one of our local commuter papers. It took me a couple of months to find her evil counterpart V Queen Anna, played by Morena Baccarin, outside of her studio spaceship and back on location. Last September, V series took over the atrium of the Vancouver Public Library for two full nights to film scenes of Baccarin, Mitchell and other cast members at a black-tie function (below) with a greenscreen wooden spaceship platform erected outside on the south plaza.

CBC Vancouver might miss V even more than me, since the series regularly rented a CBC studio for filming, put one of its V Ambassador Centres in a CBC outdoor corridor and filmed part of its series finale in the entrance lobby. Read More »BIG READ: Tribute to Axed Series as New TV Season Begins