OKANAGAN APPLE OF STUDIO’S EYE
Two proposed sound-stage facilities in Kelowna turn a spotlight on Interior’s growing film and TV production vibe
The Okanagan is ready for its close-up, as plans for two soundstage facilities turn a spotlight on the valley’s steadily growing film and TV production scene.
Eagle Creek Studios, whose two Burnaby sound stages are home to Amazon’s alternative-history series The Man in the High Castle, last week got a development permit from Kelowna city council for the first phase of a film-production studio complex.
Up the road in Vernon, Okanagan Studios has plans to convert a former clothing factory into two sound stages, after the space hosted two film productions in 2016.
The news comes as Hollywood maverick Casey Affleck begins three weeks of location filming in the woods east of Osoyoos, as writer, director and star of the thriller, Light of My Life.
Affleck will return to the Lower Mainland to complete sound-stage work on his film, something future productions won’t necessarily have to do.
“This is the biggest thing to happen since film has been made in the Okanagan,” said Jon Summerland, Okanagan film commissioner. “Now all of a sudden we can get full-time film, now we can supply a television series.”
The area is home to between 200 and 400 film workers, Summerland said, many of whom end up working in the Lower Mainland for months at a time.
“Now if we get a series here, they can be where their kids are going to school,” Summerland said.
Summerland’s territory stretches from Manning Park in the west to Christina Lake in the east, and from Osoyoos north to Grindrod.
Hollywood types have been trickling into the area since 1984, when Daryl Hannah filmed the prehistoric drama, The Clan of The Cave Bear, in Cathedral Provincial Park. More recently, parts of George Clooney’s Tomorrowland filmed around Enderby.
“We’ve gone from one movie a year when I started to last year, we had 32 different productions,” said Summerland, who has been at his job for nine years.
Eagle Creek’s Kelowna facility, to be built in an industrial park near the Kelowna airport, is budgeted at about $3.5 million. It will include 6,000 square feet of office space and a 15,000-sq.-ft. sound stage, and is scheduled to be ready by early 2018. There are plans for a second sound stage if demand warrants, said Eagle Creek general manager John Lee.
Lee’s Burnaby facility has been in operation for 16 years, hosting projects that included the 747 fuselage built for Samuel L. Jackson’s 2006 cult thriller, Snakes on a Plane.
“To expand in Vancouver is kind of cost-prohibitive right now, with the cost of land and the lack of it,” Lee said.
A 25-minute drive up the highway from Lee’s Kelowna property is Vernon’s Okanagan Studios, which Tim Bieber launched last year to accommodate the Wesley Snipes thriller, The Recall.
Vancouver-based Minds Eye Entertainment used Bieber’s warehouse space to build the movie’s interior sets as they filmed outdoor scenes around nearby Silver Star ski resort.
“It was incredible to see how they utilized the space,” said Bieber, adding the producers worked around interior pillars that he now plans to remove. The next production to use the space last year was the teen vampire flick, Drink Slay Love.
Bieber also plans to replace the roof and raise the walls to make the first of two clear-span, 40-foot-ceiling sound stages by next year.
The plans for the Okanagan are modest in comparison with the Lower Mainland, which is now one of the world’s largest production centres with more than 40 purpose-built sound stages and film workers numbering in the tens of thousands.
But that’s part of the valley’s appeal, said Drink Slay Love producer Tina Pehme of Vancouver-based Sepia Films. Pehme and her husband-business partner, Vic Sarin, have made eight films in the Okanagan since first coming to Kelowna in 2012 to make the Lifetime TV thriller, A Mother’s Nightmare with Grant Gustin, later to star as TV’s The Flash.
“It’s a different landscape than we’re all used to seeing,” Pehme said.
Drink Slay Love’s teen vampire story was originally set in Connecticut, said Pehme, but that changed with the California-esque Okanagan locales. “We re-set it to be in more of a Napa feel.”
Provincial labour tax credits for filming outside the Lower Mainland cut labour costs in the Okanagan by an additional 18.5 per cent for Canadian projects, and 12 per cent for international projects.
But Pehme said filming in the Okanagan is also cheaper because the huge U.S. TV series and movies have driven up costs for Lower Mainland services and locations.
“A lot of (Vancouver) locations are burned out,” she said, adding that in the Okanagan, “we’re able to move more easily ... we’re not spending money on gas and time.
“The actors love being there,” she said. “Everyone has told other actors how great it is to be there. It has built a little culture around it.”