Sanctuary Discussion (Spoilers for the most recent episode)

[Chelle DB]

I mean, I searched you, and I couldn't find you .

Who did you search for though??
...try that!

[Rocky89]

Who did you search for though??
Look for Chelle...try that!

Found ya .

[Chelle DB]

Huh!! You found me!!!

[Rocky89]

Huh!! You found me!!!

Indeed I did . You're so pretty in those pics . I even left a comment on one of your pics .

[Eternal Density]

I mean, what did Helen ever expect to happen to Ashley when she grew up? Maybe she'd go to law school?

Funny choice of field, because in the webcomic Narbonic, the character Mel, the gun-crazy assistant to mad scientist Doctor Helen (lol!) Narbon, chooses to study law (because it's sufficiently evil )


Related to an earlier discussion which I missed, I assume that the source blood must have an affect of all the recipient's DNA, so ova (and thus offspring) are fair game for receiving abnormality. (thanks to fictional biology )

[RealmOfX]

From Damian on Facebook :

" is loving the dailies from week 1 of shooting. Totally kick ass stuff! "


And a spoiler from Damian on Twitter has been added to the Spoiler Thread

[silly sally]

Best 25 episode titles

23 “Nubbins” Sanctuary
Just a brilliantly dopey word. We need more episodes called things like "Bobbins”, “Piffle” and “Balderdash”.

http://www.sfx.co.uk/page/sfx?entry=...t_and_worst_tv

[kes]

Cool!
I think the x files could've had a few more tittles there

[RealmOfX]

Here's the first part of the transcript for the audio interview Damian did with Geek Syndicate.

Spoilered for space, first part doesn't contain spoilers for Season 2 but does refer to Season 1 a little bit.

Spoiler:

Damian: This is Damian

Geek Syndicate: Hi Damian, this is Barry

Damian: Barry, how're you doing?

Geek Syndicate: Not too bad mate how are you doing?

Damian: Good. I was actually just on your site.

Geek Syndicate: Oh were you?

Damian: Yeah. I was just checking it out. You and your, umm what's your friends name?

Geek Syndicate: David

Damian: Yeah, David. It's a really cool site and it's like the UK version of Ain't It Cool News

Geek Syndicate: [laughs] Yeah, except we've got less swearing

Damian: That's OK, that makes you look smarter

Geek Syndicate: [laughter] So how are things with you? How're you doing?

Damian: Good, really good. got your book here, Fallen Heroes, sitting here on my desk

Geek Syndicate: Excellent

Damian: Yeah, I really love the cover, it's like pretty stylin’ man. Who did the art for that?

Geek Syndicate: It was really weird, it was a basically we started doing the podcasts and I was still writing the book then and I sort of put out a call to sort of say if anyone was interested in helping me to do a cover and basically it was a graphic designer and he's based in The States and he kind of asked me what I was after so we talked through some ideas and he came back with that and that was his first attempt

Damian: so that's cool. I'm impressed with that cover it's like a really cool graphic novel cover

Geek Syndicate: The actual book itself is going to be a graphic novel now. I hope you get a chance to read it at some stage because I think you'll find it quite interesting and probably a little bit funny how many similarities there are between Fallen Heroes and Sanctuary.

Damian: Oh yeah I'm looking forward to that

Geek Syndicate: So what I'll say is first off is say welcome to Geek Syndicate Damian

Damian: It's an absolute pleasure to be here

Geek Syndicate: Yeah thanks so much for your time because I know you guys are about to kick off filming on Monday aren't you?

Damian: We are starting Season 2 filming on Monday and we are all incredibly excited

Geek Syndicate: I'll bet

Damian: It's just one of those things where it is such an amazing journey to get here. There's lots of business and challenges and finding financial backers and all sorts of wonderful glorious things that make this so glamorous to swim through to the point where you've got a big fat expensive two parter to shoot to kick off Season 2. It's one of those things where the chaos is sort of good for us. We dove in, we swam strongly and this two part, I'm very, very proud of this two part opener that is called End Of Nights Part 1 and 2. It's going to kick off the 13 episode Season 2 of the show. It's a really, you know we left Season 1 in this amazing disarray and chaos and uncertainty and there's a big yeoman's task to somehow wrangle all that together into a story that ended strongly and conclusively and definitively. We did a full cast read through last night for both parts and Martin Wood and Amanda Tapping and I are just thrilled, we’re thrilled with how it is coming together. I'm excited for everyone to see it once it’s done in the Fall .

Geek Syndicate: Excellent. Well I know when we talked to Amanda, one of the things she said was that she'd just read the script for the two part season opener and she just said it was absolutely huge. She said she didn't know how you guys were going to shoot it. Is it still as huge? Has it got any changes at all?

Damian: It stayed in the same category of huge

Geek Syndicate: Right

Damian: The first draft is always ridiculously ambitious and it’s meant to be this big splashy, Oh isn’t this cool! But truthfully we always bring it down. We always say look we need this stunt but we don’t need that stunt, let’s spent the money on this big visual effect or car chase or shootout or monster, we don’t need this and so it’s come down a lot but look long story short it’s big, we always strike big. We have to start big and we have to end big it’s like in the middle part of the season is when you get those clever two handers like the submarine show from last year and the plane show where we have to get clever and character driven and more suspense and kind of monster lurking in the shadows. And then in the two part beginning and what will be our two hour finale of the show we are making big, big, honking, stonking episodes of Sanctuary.

Geek Syndicate: Cool. One of my favourite episodes I really loved the season finale and the second half of Sanctuary I loved because you brought your much more of historical characters, one of my favourite characters was Watson

Damian: Yeah Peter Wingfield he is amazing. Not only is he a lovely, lovely actor to work with but he really came to play, like he brought his A game up and he got on so well with Amanda and Robin and Chris Heyerdahl and every scene he swam into he was just welcomed like a brother, it was wonderful working with him

Geek Syndicate: I think my favourite scene he had was when he had a scene with Druitt and they were basically just sitting there and having a drink and I think that Will was there with a roaring fireplace and they were kind of swapping stories of how they both try to outdo each other, and it was just so well done. At one level you got the fact that they were enemies but at the same time they were best friends and you kind of played that through into sort of the rest of that season finale and I thought it was done fantastically well. I really enjoyed it.

Damian: Oh thank you. We’re very proud of that and that is all possible because Peter and Chris really know how to take on the subtext of all that. And they really know how to play it without it being too heavy handed or too subtle or what have you. They found that very, very beautiful middle ground and it was really gratifying for me because there were some scenes in there… Well first of all I, well Sam wrote part one and I thought he did a lovely job and writing part one of a two parter is always a little bit of a thankless task because it’s all set up and no payoff, right.

Geek Syndicate: Yeah

Damian: And he did a wonderful job. But I pitched out when we were breaking the episodes I said Hey what about sort of a Company of Men theme where here’s two guys that don’t give a toss about political correctness. They come from the era long before there was any kind of egalitarian movement for women and what is that like when a man of the new age sits with these two blokes who really don’t give a crap about women’s rights and I said Sam all I’m thinking is Hey write this scene where someone says what’s it like to work for a woman, and you go My God he’s 120 years old or 150 years old, like what’s that going to be like? And he took the ball and ran with it beautifully and really all that we had to do to kind of match it up well was I had wanted to have this kind of very, very ??? moment between Watson and Druitt in the catacombs where he said “it’s not that I couldn’t see the truth that you were Jack the Ripper it’s that it was You, my Best Friend!”. And to be honest Chris and Peter wanted to play a little flavour of man love. [laughter] They wanted to play a little flavour of kind of well how close were Jack The Ripper and Watson because it could have been very close. I said do whatever feels right because you want to believe it, and they did.

Geek Syndicate: Yeah they definitely did. OK well let’s go back a little bit. How did you actually come up with the idea for Sanctuary because one of the things we were kind of talking about is that it reminds me very much of my own novel Fallen Heroes there’s some similarities and it was only when I was watching episode three when you first introduced The Cabal. And I was sitting there watching it and I went hmmmm The Cabal,hang on a minute they sound familiar I’ve got villains called the cabal and just as it went on I kept seeing more and more similarities and I mentioned all this to Amanda and we were having this conversation and she said to me that you came up with the idea apparently in 1999?

Damian: Yeah. In 1999-2000 I wrote the first hour script, the pilot which is sort of the first four webisodes that we shot in January 2007. I literally just pulled it out of my computer and then I added more on to it so we could have a full two hours worth of webisodes. It was inspired by a lot of things. I was fairly appreciative, not loyal but appreciative fan of The X-Files and Buffy, I really like the writing of Joss Whedon, I loved the way Chris Carter put stories together and the angles he told them from. I really loved books like The Alienist by Caleb Carr which is a book about the modern era of profiling and psychology impacting on the old world police tactics of the turn of the turn of the century New York, turn of the 19th century New York. I found that very fascinating that collision of modern techniques with the old still in play and I really love the original League of Extraordinary Gentleman graphic novel by Alan Moore

Geek Syndicate: Oh that’s fantastic

Damian: That was a really eye opening wow look at the alternate way society could have gone. So all that came into play when I was literally sitting in Los Angeles without of a job. I had a new agent and she said look why don’t you just write a script that you would like to see on TV and that’ll be your voice. So I wrote the script and to be honest, like really brutally honest after I wrote the first hour, nobody quite got it. They went no, no, no you’ve got the Bigfoot butler guy and you’ve got this psychiatrist whose scared of the monsters and this woman who’s a freak, I don’t know. So I went OK and I put it away and started working on Stargate for the next five years.

Geek Syndicate: Right, OK

Damian: Which I loved, it was wonderful. But when that ended Martin Wood and Amanda and I kinda got together and said let’s do this and everyone really liked the script to my surprise. I thought no one really cared for it, but I don’t think that the right people had seen it yet and that was it. And then from there it was so gratifying when people from ITV and Sci Fi Channel US and our partners in Canada just embraced the idea and I’m like wow everyone really gets this show; that it’s the right mix of all these things it’s like congealed into it’s own thing. Because when I first created it, it was just for me and I thought no one is really going to like this, this is my own kind of ******y but it’s so cool that everyone else went hey what a good idea because I really didn’t think that it was going to go anywhere.

to be continued in Part 2 (when my eyes are more cooperative)

[jckfan55]

^Thanks RoX. And for warning when there are spoilers.

[Mousie]

Best 25 episode titles

23 “Nubbins” Sanctuary
Just a brilliantly dopey word. We need more episodes called things like "Bobbins”, “Piffle” and “Balderdash”.

http://www.sfx.co.uk/page/sfx?entry=...t_and_worst_tv

Interestingly enough Stargate got No.7 on the 25 Worst titles list :
7 “Ex Deus Machina” Stargate SG-1
Erm, any reason for swapping round the words?

[Jumper_One]

Laura writes: “Which was the hardest episode for you to film?”

AT: Of Stargate…..hmmmmm…. That’s so hard. Heroes because of the subject matter. Point of View. Any of the twining episodes. Of Sanctuary…Requiem.

Tim Gaffney writes: “As an actress, what is the biggest difference/challenge between working on an actual set with buildings and objects you interact with and working on a virtual set where you essentially have to imagine them. It seems like it would take a lot longer to film on a virtual set because the actors would miss their marks more often than on the physical set. And could you answer the question as an executive producer as well.”

AT: Good question. As an actor it’s actually a lot like doing theatre. Very minimalist theatre. The words, the characters, the relationships, the moment all become heightened. There are no distractions. We have props and key set pieces, so that helps. But it is up to the DP, Camera, the Director and the actors to make the physicality work. It’s definitely a team effort. It doesn’t really take a lot longer to film once everyone has figured out where everything is!

Caitlyanna writes: [...] “2. How hard is it to work on an almost all green screen set on Sanctuary? (Love the show by the way.)”

AT: Thank You!!!!! It is actually quite fun and quite liberating to work on a green screen set. Once you get used to the intensity of the green, you live in the moment. Your job is to sell the reality of the situation and the space. And it becomes more about the words and the scene. I really appreciate it a lot more now.

Sandel’ writes: “There are a few interviews where you have mentioned Sanctuary’s Requiem and how you had to act like you’ve never acted before. How would you compare your experience in Requiem to the different instances in SG-1 where you portrayed all of the alternate Sam Carters?”

AT: Funny to get this question after answering Laura’s question. J It’s cool that we think alike! Requiem was very much like the alternate Carter episodes in that I was playing a very different version of my character. It’s always fun to change things up and find the dark side. I just felt that with Requiem I stretched my wings even further. I think part of it is having more life experience under my belt. And part of it is feeling braver as a person. It just felt like a new level for me personally.

Bristow1941 writes: “ I was curious how much gender bias you find in your new role as a producer now that Sanctuary is off the ground as producers seem to have remained much more of a male-dominated role in television. What are the most successful strategies you have used to have new business associates understand the value you bring to the team (experience, female perspective, etc.)? Also how would you described your management strategy for the Sanctuary production? I’m always curious to learn from the experience of successful female executives and managers.”

AT: I am blessed in that I work with two incredibly evolved and sensitive men. I have never had to prove myself to Martin and Damian. We have known each other long enough to know what our individual strengths and weaknesses are. We have an amazing chemistry together and we are a good team. I feel the need more as “the actor” on the show to prove my worth as an executive producer. That applies to men and women. I have to overcome the “vanity title” perception that some people have. That is dispelled once they see me work and the commitment and ethic I bring to the table. This is not to say that I haven’t encountered sexism in my career. I have. I have been referred to as “the chick” and have been spoken to as if I am stupid. I believe in grace and dignity and in humility. I’ve learned that there is more power in those virtues than there is in railing against injustice. I am learning, slowly, to be calmer and to take a breath before reacting. I hope I lead by example on set. I think my “style” is one of mutual respect and admiration. I believe at the end of the day, that it should be fun to be here. And I hope people understand that they are valued.

J BlueCello writes: [...] “2. Many actors comment that playing the villain is more fun than playing the good guy. In Stargate SG-1, we had Black Ops Jack O’Neill who had done some “d**n distatesful things”, Teal’c who had killed many as Apophis’ first prime and many Goa’uld who tortured and killed countless victims, not to mention The NID/The Trust. Did you ever tire of playing Sam “Mary Poppins” Carter, and if so did the AU/RepliCarter Sam Carters help alleviate that? Did you enjoy Sanctuary’s “Requiem” more than the usual play of Helen for the same reason?”

AT: Absolutely. It’s always fun going dark side. It’s very liberating to unshackle yourself from social constraints with relative impunity.

Flygirl writes: “1. Since you wear both actor and Executive Producer hats for Sanctuary, how do you manage to juggle both roles, so effectively? Good planning? Good karma?”

AT: Sometimes I’m not so effective. I drop the balls. I have amazing partners at work and at home, who help me when I fall. It’s all about time management and prioritizing. I’m learning…..

NZNeep writes: “Hey Amanda, I love the idea of a true green set. The no paper cup thing is awesome. What other green initiatives do you have going on set?”

AT: No small plastic water bottles on our set. I’m giving the crew stainless steel water bottles as a start of season gift this year. We encourage the crew to bring their own plates and cutlery for lunch and their own coffee mugs. Its amazing how much of a daily environmental impact that has. We have recycling stations on all our stages. We are trying to make it as convenient for people as possible. If you can do without a paper script and just get one electronically, we encourage that. We are trying to create less waste. We recycle and repurpose our sets. And of course we do a lot of virtual sets, so we don’t use as much wood and building materials as most shows. That’s just for a start. We are constantly looking at ways to reduce our footprint, and the crew is so on board with it. We still have a ways to go, but we are proud of the effort everyone is making.

IggyMing writes: [...] “2. Joe mentioned the lack of recognition from the Canadian entertainment industry regarding science fiction shows, and SG1 in particular. As a Canadian actor and producer, do you feel that the Canadian industry as a whole has not embraced SG1 and Sanctuary as much as it could? Are you indifferent about this, or does it bother you?”

AT: It definitely bothers me. I don’t think Stargate was ever embraced by the Canadian industry. It was always seen as that American show even though it was filmed in Canada and the majority of people working on it were Canadian. We are finding the same thing with Sanctuary to an extent. Even though we are a 100% Canadian show. It may be a Sci-fi stigma, I don’t know. But it is something that we struggle with because amazing work is being done in this country by our writers, producers, crews and actors and our industry, to a large extent, does not validate it.

Bailey writes: “Do you find yourself evaluating your own peformances differently, now that you are a producer?”

AT: I generally don’t watch my work. I find it too difficult because I am way too self-critical. In post production I try to look at the bigger picture and have sort of found a way not to criticize the way I look too much. It’s hard not to be constantly evaluating yourself, but it can be detrimental as an actor because you end up becoming too self aware and that kills the performance.

Dani writes: “As a producer and business woman, and even as an actor, I am sure you had to do tasks that are outside your usual comfort zone or that you simply didn’t think you could accomplish. How do you go about dealing with such challenges and how do you get motivated to at least give it a try?”

AT: If the past three years have taught me anything at all, it is that life is an enormous leap of faith. I took bigger risks and took on more challenges than I thought possible, but I did it with Martin and Damian and that helped. We scared the crap out of ourselves and more than once felt like giving up, but we didn’t. I just realized that it was time in my career and in my life to take on a new goal.

Jann writes: “1) How did you, together with Martin and Damian came on the idea to make a tv-show(or internet show) like Sanctuary? And how did it progress from an idea to actually making this show?”

AT: Damian actually wrote it as a spec script back in 2000. He showed it to Martin in 2006, I think. Then they gave it to me. It grew from there through many stages. The Internet didn’t really pan out for a lot of reasons. I think we were trying too hard to do too many things at once. The TV show was a natural progression because of the interest from broadcasters. It has been a very difficult road. But we are really proud to be here.

http://josephmallozzi.wordpress.com/...our-questions/

[morjana]

TV Guide Online - Tonight's TV Hot List for Friday Apr 3 '09:

I love how TV Guide Online described the cast of Stargate: Continuum:

At TV Guide Online:

(Please follow the link for the complete column.)

Tonight's TV Hot List for Friday, April 3, 2009

Apr 3, 2009

by TV Guide News

... Stargate: Continuum

9 pm/ET Sci Fi

The franchise boldly goes where The Terminator and Star Trek: First Contact have gone before when Ba'al (Cliff Simon), a baddie from the series' rogues' gallery, goes back in time to prevent the good guys from becoming a threat. Ben Browder (Farscape), Amanda Tapping (Sanctuary), Richard Dean Anderson (MacGyver) and the rest of the SG-1 team star in this direct-to-video flick.

-— Michael Chant

[morjana]

Sanctuary - Jace Hall Show Visits Sanctuary set:

http://forum.gateworld.net/showpost....85&postcount=1

[RealmOfX]

SciFi has put up a clip of things coming in 2009-2010 and Sanctuary appeared a few times throughout and there was a sound bite at the end of Ashley saying "Atta boy". Check it out here

There's also some new stuff for Stargate Universe in there as well.