Interview with Caprica location scouts

L.A. Times talked to Anand Kanna and Scott Firth, who are location scouts for the show. You can read the article here.

Grand designs: Caprica City is fictional, but it was largely designed by a real Vancouver architect. "Arthur Erickson buildings totally suit the style of the show," Firth said. "He's one of our favorite Vancouver architects, and you'll see quite a few of his buildings in 'Caprica.' He did some buildings at the University of British Columbia and the Vancouver Public Library. They're quite striking. They're really sexy buildings."

Neighborhood watch: "We used different parts of the city for different challenges," Kanna explained. "In Vancouver, there's an area called Coal Harbour, which is very modern. That was perfect for establishing Caprica City itself, the steel and glass look of downtown Caprica and its really modern-looking buildings." Added Firth, "And then there's another area of town in the series, and it's called Little Tauron, which is a little bit backwards. It's more of the run-down, '40s feel. So we would go to Chinatown for that."

City limits: At any given time, parts of Vancouver appear on a municipal "hot list," published quarterly. "We usually get a list from the city of locations where it's dicey to move into," Kanna said. "It's a list of sensitive areas that have had a lot of filming, and it's to give everybody a bit of a rest from having a film crew in their neighborhood. And a lot of the stuff on the hot list is construction -- not to film on a road that has a big pit on it with no water main in there. So the hot list is there just as a guideline, but the city works with us, and everything ends up working out fine in the end."

Place holders: Since the "Caprica" writers cast their imaginations far beyond Vancouver's brick-and-mortar reality, the location scouts follow suit. "You have to be pretty creative in a lot of ways," Firth said. "The farthest we've been away is about 50 kilometers from the studio, and it was a 40,000-square-foot mansion on a farm. But it was scripted as something else. A location doesn't have to be exactly what's in the script, as long as you can make it look like what you need, whether you have to augment it with some set decoration or a sign.