The fictional town of Patience, Colorado is — to quote the South Park movie from 1999 — a “quiet mountain town.” It’s a picturesque slice of Americana surrounded by snow-capped mountains, crystal clear lakes…and an alien pretending to be a human physician.
In other words, it’s the perfect setting for SYFY’s Resident Alien adaptation, whose production is not based in Colorado. “In real life, it was based here in Vancouver. That’s where 90 percent of the filming took place,” location manager Ken Brooker told SYFY WIRE ahead of the show’s world premiere in 2021 (the third season debuts February 14). “It’s where we had our stages; we had two sound stages and a handful of locations. We shot 10 episodes, so, on average, each episode probably had about a dozen or so locations within it.”
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While the majority of interior locations are shot on controlled sound stages, all of the exteriors are real-world locations. For example, the exterior of Harry’s cozy lakeside cabin is a facade at Britannia Beach, which actually borders an inlet, not a lake. “It’s part of the Howe Sound. … so you can cheat that reasonably and make it look like a lake,” Brooker explained.
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When it comes to sequences set atop snowy glaciers, the crew makes use of two frigid locations within British Columbia’s famous Sea-to-Sky Corridor: Rainbow Mountain and the Pemberton Ice Cap. “Both of those locations were helicopter access only,” Brooker revealed. “It was really a challenge to [get] people and gear and everything to and from [there].”
How SYFY’s Resident Alien Built the Town of Patience in Canada
For the Patience exteriors and Main Street, the production leaves the comfort and familiarity of Vancouver’s city limits for Ladysmith, a small town on Vancouver Island that can only be accessed by ferry.
“We essentially filmed it at about three or four historical blocks of downtown. The architecture came from the early 1900s,” assistant location manager Kevin McLean said. “To me, it was very similar to how we film in other blocks in Vancouver, but on a larger scale. We had to talk to the town’s council to get our traffic plan approved and we had to work with many little businesses for weeks in advance of the filming, which really only took place over two or three days.”
“Early on, the directive was, ‘You need to have a small town set in the mountains, kind of remote-ish,’” Brooker added. “It still needed to have enough infrastructure, it couldn’t be a sleepy little backwater, necessarily. It had to have some sense of character and a real sense of place. A lot of that came out through Ladysmith.”
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He continued: “One of the main things is the fact that our three big anchor locations — our town hall, our town’s clinic, and this bar called ‘The 59’ — all had to be visually linked and they had to be within sight of each other. Talk about finding a needle in a haystack. You need to have the perfect locations individually for each of those things, but then they all have to be in geographic proximity, so we were very fortunate. Ladysmith was a real good find for us and it played well. It looks great on camera and the people there were very welcoming.”
While filming in Ladysmith, the cast and crew frequent local haunts such as the vegan restaurant Plantitude. “It became really popular because a lot of the cast had specific dietary considerations, so it was kind of cool for them to find a place that literally catered to them,” Brooker explained. “Oddly enough, that particular restaurant is frequented by Pam Anderson. She actually lives in Ladysmith, believe it not. She’s from there and moved back; she’s sort of become the main patron of this place and it’s just attracted lots of people.”
Other popular joints include: Zack’s Lounge, Roberts Street Pizza, and Old Town Bakery. “There’s [also] an old hotel that was closed down that was just opened up [when we were there] and they had a pool table,” Brooker concluded. “It had a small-town feel.”
Season 3 of Resident Alien premieres on SYFY on Wednesday, February 14, with a premiere simulcast on USA Network. New episodes will be available next day on Peacock.
Catch up on all of Resident Alien on Peacock before the Season 3 premiere.
Source: https://t-tees.com
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