(This post has lots of photos from the shoot.   Scroll down for a link to the album)

Ok, so I heard that Battlestar Galactica was filming this week at my school, Simon Fraser University.  Now, this confused me, because the last time BSG was filmed here was for the opening miniseries of the whole TV show, when the AQ gardens & pond served as a location on the planet/colony Caprica. If you’ve ever watched any BSG, you should know that Caprica along with the other 11 colonies got nuked to waste by the Cylon invasion.  And the Colonial fleet (i.e. the humans) has spent 3 1/2 seasons travelling away from Caprica/SFU.  So WHY might they be fliming at SFU again, in the same location of the AQ pond and gardens?  I have no idea.  There’s a slight possibility that they’re just going to film tightly on certain parts of the AQ pond, and hope that no one recognizes that it’s the same place as shown on Caprica, but I doubt that.

I Wiki’d Caprica last night while starting this blog post, and I found out that they’re making a spin-off TV series called Caprica set on that planet 50 to 70 years before BSG!  So I started getting excited when I found this out, but then I realized that they couldn’t have been filming Caprica.  Why?  Because President Laura Roslin would have been like, 0 years old in that time period, and Mary McDonnell (the actress who plays President Roslin) isn’t even listed as part of the cast of Caprica on Imdb.com.  But WHY am I even mentioning President Roslin of the Twelve Colonies?

BECAUSE I met her yesterday.

Yup, I met Madame President herself, and she even shook my hand and asked my name!  I have to confess, I didn’t actually know her real name at the time (Mary McDonnell).  But she was very nice and after thinking about it for awhile, I’d have to say my first impression of her is that she seems like she’s really the President who just happened to be asked to act in some Colonial TV series for a bit, and so now she’s pretending to be an actress.  In other words, I have a hunch that a lot of her real personality is poured into how she carries herself in her role on BSG, cause it seems a bit like you’re actually talking to the President when you get to talk to her.

Anyways, the whole reason I was up there yesterday was to take photos!  And I’m hoping that the real BSG community (not a poser fan like myself who’s only watched like 10% of the show over the last few years) will come in here and help figure out where the last half of this season is headed and why they seem to be filming back on Caprica.  So without further ado, let us begin the photo journalism!

Thoughts & notes: If you’d like to link or post my photos elsewhere, please go ahead but I’d appreciate it if you credit me (Paulman C) and link back to this blog or blog post. Also, my friends have called me a paparrazi before, and now I’m afraid I may have literally crossed over into that category. Maybe there’s a handy euphemism, like “embedded photo-spectator” we can use, instead.

Now for the photos:

Here’s a link to the entire album I have up on my Picasa (1600×1200 max resolution, only): FULL ALBUM

If you click on each photo, it will send you to the Picasa photo page and you can click on a small Magnifying Glass button near the top right to zoom in.  Here is a selection of the photos I took:

1. At first I heard that the only cast member involved in the shooting would be the woman wearing black, but since I was far away I couldn’t quite tell who she was.  I had a hunch it might be the President.

2. This is when they started getting ready to film the scene.  Note the strange futuristic baby stroller behind President Roslin.

3. Ok, here we go!  The President (Mary McDonnell) starts filming her scene as she steps in the pond (which is usually really, really yucky).


4. Ok, now she’s under the fountains (which were brought in just for the filming).  I’m not sure why she’s there, but she may have looked sick or something.  At the very least, her acting seemed despondent/desparate, almost.  Maybe she’s dying (well, we “know” she’s dying).
(There are a lot more photos in this sequence if you want to check my album)

5. And thus concludes the filming.  Ms. McDonnell bowed to the audience in response to the applause for her performance.

6. And to close, some shots of Ms. McDonnell after the shoot.

Anyways, around this point I asked Mary McDonnell if she’d be up for taking a picture with me, but she declined saying “not looking like this!” :P   I guess she felt a little disheveled, what just coming out of the water and all.  But she felt bad as the group of us were walking towards the trailers (I was walking to another building on campus in the same direction), and she asked if we’d like her to sign an autograph or something.  I was a little hesitant as I said, “sure…”, and started taking off my backpack to get something (my backpack is a bit disorganized and I was trying to figure out what I might have that she should sign), but then she sensed my hesitation and told me that I didn’t have to if I didn’t want to.  So I felt kind of bad, because she was trying to be nice to me and I was acting all reluctant!  Well, Ms. McDonnell, if you’re reading this, I didn’t mean to act reluctant and I really appreciate your niceness!  From this encounter, I definitely get the impression that Mary McDonnell puts thought and effort into making sure her fans feel appreciated.  So kudos for that :)

I’m going to head back up to school, now.  Who knows if they’re still filming?  But then again I’m not really up at school to take photos… (or am I?)

Note: In the last photo, I think Ms. McDonnell looks like a Dark Jedi/Sith Lord with that hood, heh heh.  Perhaps she’s actually Darth Roslin?

Discussion: So, what do you think they’re filming up here at SFU?  A flashback to Caprica?  Or maybe a recreation/reconstruction of this part of Caprica on the new Earth?

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