Battlestar Back At It

As of today, the cast and crew of Battlestar Galactica are back at work in our fair city. Shooting on the last half of the final season is expected to continue from now until the end of June.

Co-Executive Producer Mark Verheiden reports in his blog that shooting will start today on Episode 12, which will be directed by none other than Ronald D. Moore himself, and will mark Moore’s first time in the director’s chair. For his part, Moore says he’s excited to be behind the camera for this one, but will focus on telling a good story rather than trying to be too clever.

Good luck to everyone and welcome back to Vancouver!

Happy Easter from The 13th Colony

Cylon Centurion + Cadbury Chocolates + Season 3 DVDs = a very good long weekend!
If only I can keep Frak and his cannons away from the chocolate!

Welcome to Caprica

Vancouver is about to get even more Battlestar Galactica, with word that the spinoff series Caprica has been green-lit by Sci-Fi Channel and pre-production will begin shortly in our city.

I’m thrilled for our film community to see more work coming in following the recent cancellation or uncertain futures of so many locally-shot series, including The 4400, Bionic Woman and Flash Gordon.

BUT, in anyone else’s hands, a show dubbed “Dallas, in space” would have me running for the hills. That’s the worst description since Firefly got saddled with “A western, in space” and as a result, turned people off in droves. Hollywood’s need to sum-up any creative material into witty catch phrases of one or two sentences does a disservice to the intelligent viewer, but that is a topic for another time.

Producers Ron D Moore and David Eick are behind this new Battlestar Galactica spinoff, so I have high hopes.

The most complete description I’ve read of the new series so far is here at Hollywood North Report:

‘Caprica’ is a fictional planet set 70 years before the new Battlestar Galactica TV series, focusing on the peaceful ‘Twelve Colonies’, living in a modern society. But high tech combined with a breakthrough in robotics brings to life the dream of marrying artificial intelligence with mechanical bodies to create living robots, the ‘Cylons’, leading to the ‘First Cylon War’.

The series will revolve around the ‘Adama’ and ‘Graystone’ families. ‘Joseph Adama’, father of future Battlestar commander ‘William Adama’, is a renowned civil liberties lawyer who becomes an opponent of the artificial intelligence/Cylon experiments devised by the Graystones, owners of a large computer corporation that builds the first Cylons, aka ‘Cybernetic Life-Form Nodes’.

Exploring the ethical issues behind the development of intelligent machines ought to be fascinating and like BSG, could be very topical. But if Joseph Adama even remotely resembles J R Ewing, yikes!

Season Four Premiere Frak Party

It’s been a very long year, hasn’t it?

On April 4^th, at 7pm PDT, the long wait comes to an end with the premiere of “He That Believeth in Me,” the Season Four opener of Battlestar Galactica. So of course, a bunch of Vancouver BSG fans are getting together to watch the show!

The 13^th Colony is holding a Premiere Frak Party (PFP) at Eighties Restaurant, our favourite sci-fi friendly hangout in North Vancouver. The Burrard Inlet Fan Fellowship (BIFF) usually takes over the big screen at Eighties on Friday nights but they’ve generously agreed to make that Friday a special BSG night. (We suspect a number of BIFFers might actually be 13^th Colonists in clever “generic geek” disguises.)

Wanna watch the premiere with other fans who are just as keen on seeing what happens as you are? Who’ve been waiting a frakkin’ long time to find out? And who will be absolutely dead silent during the show but freak out during commercials? Then join us! For more details, visit our Meetup event page here.

BSG Shooting Locations – SFU

One of the most prominently used locations for sci-fi shows made in Vancouver is Simon Fraser University. Located on top of Burnaby Mountain, SFU has stood in for various alien worlds in a variety of sci-fi movies and TV shows shot in and around town, including Stargate, X-Files, and of course, Battlestar Galactica. To see Caprica, either before or after the attack, one goes to SFU.

On the map shown above, the “Academic Quadrangle” stood in for a Caprica market where Six killed a baby in the Miniseries. It is where Roslin saw Baltar & Six together in “Epiphanies”, where Helo shot Sharon in “Kobol’s Last Gleaming, Part 1.” Many of the views from Convocation Mall are seen in the scenes between Helo and Sharon, and between Six and Baltar. Notably, the area marked “Service Station” on the map and the building just south of it is where the scenes in front of the Delphi Museum of the Colonies on Caprica were shot for the “Kobol’s Last Gleaming, Part 2.” If you would like to see other pictures we took on our SFU Scouting Mission last summer, click here.