Homeless in Vancouver: Film shoot photos I snapped by accident

On Monday (April 27), as near to 4 p.m. as makes no difference, I came across a film crew that had turned the intersection of Columbia Street and 8th Avenue by Jonathan Rogers Park in East Vancouver into the scene of a major traffic accident.

In the centre of the intersection was a flipped black SUV. Its roof was buckled where the driver and front seat passengers would be and its front end and wheels were all out of kilter and akimbo.

Off on the west side of Columbia Street, in the middle of 8th Avenue, was a Chevy van conversion, dark cream-coloured with lots of brown pin-striping and capped with a white fiberglass high-top. The front end of the van was stove-in dead centre as though the van had front-ended a boat prow just a bit lower than the van’s windshield, which had a circular impact but was otherwise intact. The front of the van bore a Washington State license plate (B58850S).

Around the periphery waited a scatter of emergency responders: two marked Seattle police cars, two Seattle paramedics’ trucks, a fire engine and one wheeled chrome gurney sitting all by itself on the sidelines.

What gave it all away as a cinematic contrivance, aside from the glaring lights, reflectors, and camera set up on the northeast corner of the intersection was the lack of smoke or gasoline fumes or plastic debris as well as the enormous abundance of film crew types. Not to mention the fact that everything and almost everyone was sitting around doing nothing much.

When I asked someone involved in the production—a lad dressed in bright fluorescent safety gear—what was being filmed. He answered me guardedly that it was a TV series but he wouldn’t tell me which one.

There were at least six TV series that could have been filming yesterday (April 27): Cedar Cove, Continuum, Impastor, Mistresses, Stalwart, and The Man in the High Castle, according to a Directors Guild of Canada, B.C. District Council list of current productions for April 24, 2015.

And the same list had four TV movies potentially out and about filming somewhere in the city: Garage Sale Mystery: The Wedding Dress, In their Own Hands, Manny’s Best Friend, and Ungodly Acts.

I doubt that I’ll ever see the TV series that today’s shoot was made for, unless it was the The Man in the High Castle, but I understand that other people out there in the blogosphere do watch a lot of television; if so, keep your eyes peeled and let me know if you see Vancouver’s Jonathan Rogers Park serving as the backdrop for a car accident in Seattle.