Category Archives: Eureka
EUREKA’s Colin Ferguson & Niall Matter Reunite on Tonight’s PRIMEVAL: NEW WORLD
Five weeks after the mid-season finale, Primeval: New World returns tonight on a new night with a fresh episode called Breakthrough, featuring a very special guest star — the very funny Colin Ferguson. It was great to know Ferguson had returned to Vancouver to film this episode last summer, even if nobody spotted the former Eureka town sheriff on location for PNW as a Howard Hughes-esque brainiac (and hoarder?) named Howard Kanan. How does Ferguson reunite with good friend Niall Matter, Eureka’s bad-boy physicist turned Primeval: New World’s team leader Evan Cross? Well, Kanan apparently helps his former nemesis Cross realize a major breakthrough until it all goes wrong somehow. Sounds like a typical day in Eureka.
Except this is Primeval: New World in Vancouver, so there must be a dinosaur-of-the-week to complicate things too. Tonight’s triceratops might be on its way to becoming as famous as a certain piano-playing cat when a video starts to go viral.
Primeval: New World now airs Tuesdays at 7 p.m. (PT)/10 p.m. (ET) on SPACE in Canada.
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#Eureka’s Last Ever Episode – Updated
In the last ever episode of Eureka tonight, the Department of Defense’s closure of this charming, eccentric town — inhabited by brilliant scientists working on top-secret projects for the American government – is delayed by random wormhole materializations or in other words, ”Just Another Day” in Eureka. I saw one of these materializations being filmed in Chilliwack last August, with a Sheriff Jack Carter stunt double falling through a wormhole from above the Archimedes statue onto the grass outside the Sheriff’s Office facade. Colin Ferguson told us he was too banged up from other stunts to do this one himself but he gladly took over for the lying-on-the-grass-being-lifted-to-his-feet-by-Joe Morton’s-Dr.-Henry-Deacon part. You can see Carter’s wedding ring on Ferguson’s ring finger, which I didn’t notice at the time and so posted an inadvertent spoiler of Carter’s marriage to Dr. Allison Blake this season.
Here are the happy married couple — Colin Ferguson’s everyman Sheriff Carter and Salli Richarson-Whitfield’s brilliant scientist Dr. Allison Blake — sitting on a bench oustide the Sheriff’s Office facade for a scene and posing for a producer’s camera in a beautifully-staged shot which was photobombed by the director Matt Hastings, who couldn’t resist messing it up.
Laughter and tears for a much-loved series. Locals who’d been watching Eureka film for up to seven years dropped in that day to say a final goodbye, as cast and crew hugged it out between scenes and takes.
Everything about the last shoot in Chilliwack seemed bittersweet. 
Syfy had renewed and then cancelled Eureka that month, coughing up enough money to film this wrap-up episode.
Eureka is one of those series that ended before its time, so I was happy to see the Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles honour it a week ago with a special event, An Evening with Eureka. After a screening and a preview of tonight’s series finale, showrunner and co-creator Jaime Paglia and cast Colin Ferguson, Salli Richardson-Whitfield, Joe Morton, Neil Grayston (Dr. Douglas Fargo) and Felicia Day (Dr. Holly Marten) talked about what Eureka meant to them. I will miss it, too.
Update: Now that I’ve seen the finale I realize this post had more spoilers than I thought even though I didn’t include my photos of Henry’s reunion with Tembi Locke’s Grace or of the mysterious benefactor (it turns out I photographed a body double for James Callis in Chilliwack so seeing Callis on screen was a nice surprise tonight). Here’s a link to my flickr set of the last shoot in Chilliwack.
YVRSHOOTS Series: Vancouver Productions Working the Comic-Con Craziness
Published July 9th, 2012 on Vancouver is Awesome
How’s this for Comic-Con craziness? Comic-Con tweeted Twilight fans today asking them not to start lining up outside the San Diego Convention Center three days before the convention starts on Thursday like they did last year. The anual geekfest doesn’t want them to erect another Camp Twilight tent city either. Any Twihard or TwiMom who tries to line up earlier than tomorrow or brings more than a chair and a sleeping bag with them, risks not being among the six thousand-plus lucky enough to get into the final vampires & werewolves panel at lunchtime on Thursday. If asked to leave, they’ll miss seeing exclusive footage from the mainly Vancouver-shot The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn 2 and celebrity trio Kristin Stewart, Robert Pattison and Taylor Lautner in person. Organizers have scheduled the final Twilight movie as the first official panel in marquee Hall H so that Twilight teens and their Moms can’t ruin Comic-Con like they have in the past.
[Update: A Twilight fan who'd been camping outside the San Diego Convention Center since Sunday was struck and killed by an SUV on Tuesday morning while rushing to cross the street to get back to the lineup which Comic-Con organizers were moving. Fellow fans are trying to organize a moment of silence in her honour during the Breaking Dawn 2 panel.]
Once the Twihards have gone home, Comic-Con is free to fly its geek flag until Sunday night, epitomized by what could be 2012′s hottest panel — the 10th Anniversary reunion of the cast (and creator) of space western Firefly, featuring Canada’s own browncoat Nathan “Captain Tightpants” Fillion. Is cult TV once again dominating big budget movies at Comic-Con with Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead and The Big Bang Theory panels all in high demand too?
Maybe, maybe not. Iron Man 3 is a hot ticket, as are the Warner Bros./Legendary Pictures and Sony Pictures panels in Hall H. Who doesn’t want to see footage from The Hobbit, which just wrapped filming in New Zealand? Or get a first look at two other mainly Vancouver-shot movies: the upcoming Superman reboot Man of Steel starring Henry Cavill (seen below filming a shirtless green screen rescue scene in North Vancouver) as part of the Warner Bros. panel on Saturday afternoon and mysterious space station movie Elysium starring Matt Damon (link to first official photo) and Jody Foster as part of the Sony panel on Friday afternoon. Vancouver director Neill Blomkamp will be on hand with his stars to answer questions about the followup to his Oscar-nominated first feature District 9. It turns out Elysium is the name of a vast space station constructed by a company called Armadyne where the very rich live in the year 2159 (want-ads for Armadyne popped up at last year’s Comic-Con, 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 Damon is Max, who goes up against Foster as hard-line government official Minister Delacourt [corrected], who will stop at nothing to enforce anti-immigration laws and preserve the grandious lifestyle of the citizens of Elysium in space (the mansion set below on Kent Hangar field could be on the space station).
Filming of Tonight’s Sheriff Carter Stunts for #Eureka – Updated
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.
#Eureka’s Season Five Premiere – Updated
Sheriff Jack Carter faces his biggest challenge yet: trying to figure out what happened to the town’s brilliant scientists, who mysteriously vanished just before their planned launch to the Saturn moon of Titan in the season four finale. We see them crash landing back home in Eureka (actually the Coquitlam gravel pits) in the opening scenes of the season five premiere, the aptly-titled Lost. Four years later, apparently!
It was a great twist. What personal changes have taken place in their absence? What did this mean for Sheriff Carter’s romance with Dr. Allison Blake, who was on the spaceship Astreus when it vanished? One thing’s for sure: over the course of the final episodes, we will be making lots of visits to two blocks of Wellington Street in Chilliwack, which crew transformed regularly into this very eccentric fictional Oregon town with Eureka Sheriff’s Office and Cafe Diem facades, a fountain/statue of Euripedes (which is still there); Main Street and Euripedes street signs; smart cars; Weather Predictor screens; and Uranium Isotope Droff Off Center, Hover Boarding Prohibited and 1-Hour Hologram Processing signs.
Below are photos of Colin Ferguson as Sheriff Jack Carter and Salli Richardson-Whitfield as Dr. Allison Blake in Chilliwack as Eureka.
Eureka’s season five airs Mondays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Syfy in the U.S. and at 10 p.m. ET/PT on SPACE in Canada
Update: Eureka fooled me good with its season five premiere. Jack and Joe seemed like something that should have already happened so I was going with this four-year time jump right up until the last scene. Showrunner Jaime Paglia live-tweeted the Syfy east coast and west broadcasts, revealing this is the episode where a staged Eureka explosion on Wellingston Street in Chilliwack accidentally blew out the windows of the book store — “Oooops”.
#YVRShoots Series – 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.
#YVRShoots Series – 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.
#YVRShoots Series – Eureka on Location 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
YVRSHOOTS Series – 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
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