SCI FI Channel greenlights webisode series Sanctuary for television!

SciFi Channel has greenlit a 13 episode season of Sanctuary, a television series to be based on a series of webisodes broadcast last spring on the web. The original webisodes were the project of Stargate sovereign Amanda Tapping, and SG-1’s writer-producer Damian Kindler and producer-director Martin Wood. Kindler created Sanctuary, while Wood directed the webisodes starring Tapping. The webisodes were originally available on a subscription basis but the web being the wonderful beast that it is you can find them over on YouTube. But you didn’t hear that from me.

Tapping stars as the mysterious Dr. Helen Magnus, ‘tapping’ into her English roots for her soft linguistic inflection. Tapping plays a 157-year-old scientist who runs a secret organization that seeks out extraordinary people. It also co-stars Robin Dunne as Will Zimmerman the young doctor with an open mind, Emilie Ullerup as Ashley Magnus, Helen’s leather-clad gun-toating daughter, and Christopher Heyerdahl ("Halling" on Stargate Atlantis) as Montague John Druitt, evil incarnate.

I just watched the first two eps myself. Not bad. Fairly typical sci-fi stuff. Creatures. Violence. Rain. Comic relief. The recipe of good sci-fi has been pulled out of mom’s recipe box. But it is not so much the synopsis that is the breakthrough point for the series. The real breakthrough is that the series will shot with the same green-screen/CG generated virtual set style that was perfected in movies like Sin City and 300. The fact that the team behind the webisodes was able to do it so well without a big budget says how far we’ve come with the technology. About 90% of the background and environment will be CG.

And I’m not going to lie to you. Seeing Emilie Ullerup trot around in a full vinyl cat-suit is a plus as well.

“We were blown away by the level of quality they have been able to achieve on a Web budget,” Sci Fi Exec VP Original Programming Mark Stern said. “We loved the world they’d created, and we particularly loved their approach, since we had been looking for a way to apply the virtual-set CGI environment from films like ‘300’ and ‘Sin City’ to a television series.”

And production will not be a problem because the series is based up here in Canada [likely Vancouver] and like our anthem says Canada is indeed the ‘True North, Strong and Free’. Free from the effects of the writers strike that is.