Tag Archives: film
TRAILER: Final MAN OF STEEL Trailer Ahead of June 14th Release
Final Man of Steel of trailer — Fate of Your Planet — with Superman Begins scenes of a rugged, bearded Clark Kent (Henry Cavill) shot in Ucluelet and Nanaimo on Vancouver Island and on a vast green screen stage at the Vancouver Drydocks in North Vancouver.
Related: Man of Steel’s Henry Cavill Films in North Vancouver
SHOOT: Will this Warhead Make GODZILLA Go Kaboom at the Steveston Docks?
In tonight’s rehearsal, a group of US soldier extras carry a warhead onto a prop red San Francisco Whale Watching Tours boat at the Steveston docks. Will that be enough to make Godzilla go kaboom?
SHOOT: GODZILLA Comes Ashore at Steveston Docks as San Francisco
Godzilla came ashore last week for three nights in a row at the Steveston docks dressed like San Francisco Fisherman’s Wharf. U.S. soldiers did their best, shooting bullets at the primeval sea monster in the water from a red Go Whales Tours whale-watching boat. Despite the noise of the simulated gunfire, it wasn’t effective. I asked the military extras if they thought they’d got him — “He’s still out there. Stay tuned,” they admitted.
And so Godzilla returns to the Steveston docks tonight, but this time with the second unit. Does this mean Godzilla goes kaboom?
The Wow factor at the night shoots was the size of the hoists and lights not the monster we couldn’t see. Lights bigger than anything we’ve seen in Vancouver. Even bigger than Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol, according to someone who’d worked on the Tom Cruise blockbuster.
SHOOT: Aaron Taylor-Johnson Faces GODZILLA in Steveston
Godzilla star Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Kick-Ass) filmed a scene last Tuesday in a closed intersection in Steveston south of Vancouver with 200 military extras and two spheres on either end of a pole to represent the gigantic, primeval sea monster terrorizing the town. We don’t know yet if the rebooted Godzilla is powered by nuclear radiation like its predecessors but the flaming burnout cars on sets suggest it does shoot some kind of radioactive fire. So why are all these soldiers shooting bullets at Godzilla when it clearly has no impact ? Because that’s what they’re trained to do.
Related: Godzilla invades Once Upon a Time’s Storybrooke, aka Steveston.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson jumps out of the truck.
SHOOT: GODZILLA Invades ONCE UPON A TIME’s Storybrooke, aka Steveston
Feature film Godzilla invaded Steveston last week. Two hundred U.S. military extras stormed the village to protect it from the wrath of the Japanese monster. Ahead of the Tuesday shoot, crew turned Moncton Street into a different American town instead of the familiar Storybrooke, Maine, of Once Upon a Time. They covered up the Steveston Marine & Hardware with Tall Pines Tools and Fasteners rather than Welcome to Storybrooke. Turned the Cannery Cafe into Taqueria Bosque. instead of Granny’s Diner. Dressed Splash Toys as the Wood Eagle Bar rather than Neighbour’s. And so on.
U.S. military backgrounders outside what used to be Mr. Gold’s Pawnbroker in Storybrooke.
SHOOT: Joel Kinnaman as ROBOCOP in Big Night Shoot at Vancouver Convention Centre
Joel Kinnaman is the fatally-wounded cop who returns to the force as a powerful cyborg RoboCop in a reboot of the 1980s/1990s movie franchise. Here he is doing additional scenes near the Olympic Cauldron yesterday. The night shoot drew a big crowd of spectators early on when his stunt double rode the RoboCop motorcycle down Thurlow to the Vancouver Convention Centre dressed as OmniCorp.
RoboCop continues to film at the Convention Centre tonight but production is expected to be inside. Filming here is part of the two-plus weeks of “reshoots” that RoboCop is doing in Vancouver to accomodate star Joel Kinnaman who is committed to filming the AMC series The Killing in this city. Principal photography for RoboCop was done last summer in Toronto.
YVRSHOOTS Series: Vancouver Director Jeff Renfroe’s Ice Age Thriller THE COLONY
Published April 25, 2013 on Vancouver is Awesome
How do you survive in a frozen world? The next ice age forces humans underground in Canadian sci-fi thriller The Colony, which opens nationwide tomorrow. Directed by Vancouver’s own Jeff Renfroe, The Colony explores what happens when hunger and desperation below an icy surface lead to the kind of savage, animalistic behaviour we’ve seen shades of in real-word disasters like Hurricane Katrina.
Reluctant hero Sam (Kevin Segers) accompanies Colony 7′s leader Briggs (Laurence Fishburne) on an expedition to the only other known outpost Colony 5 after receiving a distress call. Briggs leaves his below-ground colony at the mercy of hardass Mason (Bill Paxton) who’s itching to impose his own harsh regime where the sick are executed at the first sign of illness. “You’re a dick,” yelled a woman beside me at an advance screening. Deservedly so. But what the expedition find at Colony 5 is so much worse than Mason: wild, feral survivors who’ve lost their humanity completely.
How do you film a frozen world? Jeff Renfroe shot his $16 million feature in twenty-eight days in North Bay and Toronto, Ontario. On the first day of filming outside in North Bay, crew battled -30 temperatures which froze the camera lenses. Watching them fight the cold and pull it off, Bill Paxton dubbed the Colony crew “film animals”. Laurence Fishburne called another North Bay shoot the toughest location he’d ever seen. Weren’t you in Apocalypse Now?, Renfroe reminded the actor. Yes, Fishburne replied, but North Bay still ranked as his toughest. The frozen surface is almost all VFX. Colony crew shovelled snow into an airplane hangar, surrounded the set with green screens and shot through an open doorway.
- Kevin Zegers and Laurence Fishburne in The Colony. Courtesy of EOne Films.
- Laurence Fishburne, Director Jeff Renfroe and Kevin Zegers. Courtesy of EOne Films.
TRAILER: Neill Blomkamp’s ELYSIUM with Matt Damon Filmed in Vancouver & Mexico City
The year 2154. The privileged live on Elysium. No poverty. No war. No sickness. The rest of us live on Earth.
An over-populated, ruined planet Earth where two-thirds of the movie is set. Crew filmed some of ruined planet Earth in one of the world’s largest garbage dumps on the outskirts of Mexico City. I passed through it once years ago on a luxury bus to play field hockey against the Mexican national team at a posh country club. We could see countless families living in makeshift cardboard box homes but didn’t stop to breathe in the fecal matter like star Matt Damon did while shooting there. Vancouver director Neill Blomkamp (District 9) and crew had masks and respirators but Damon stood unprotected as the wind from helicopters above sprayed him with bits of garbage and dung.
No wonder his character Max DaCosta wants to leave the shanty towns of 22nd Century Los Angeles and break into the most heavily-guarded place in the universe — the vast, luxurious space station called Elysium orbiting above. Irradiated at his factory job, Max needs to cure himself with Elysium’s high-tech medicine, but Jodie Foster’s head of the Elysium Corporate Authority doesn’t take kindly to illegal immigrants, especially those who crash their spaceship into a one percenter’s garden. Here’s a look at that crash at Kent Hangar field in Vancouver before the VFX were added.
SHOOT: Road Biker Extras at Two Chefs & a Table for WORDS AND PICTURES
Last Thursday feature film Words and Pictures had a last-minute casting call for bike rider extras to film on Monday. Turns out the scene was not a road race as expected but a gathering of friends in bike gear inside Two Chefs & a Table restaurant on Alexander Street in the Downtown Eastside.
The scene: outside the restaurant — renamed The Grill — a man in spandex bike attire talks on his cellphone before going inside to join his road racer friends.
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