Planes, trains and — ferry boats?

Shaftesbury’s crime procedural Departure ventured out to sea for its third season, following a team of investigators as they uncover why a ferry sank off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.

The 6 x 60-minute season, which premiered on Global on Aug. 7 and airs its season finale on Monday (Sept. 11), was produced by Toronto-based Shaftesbury and St. John’s Pope Productions, in association with Corus Entertainment, Starlings Entertainment and Red Arrow Studios International, and filmed over 39 days in 2021.

Filming the season’s intense ferry sequences took place across two provinces and three different locations, all done largely using practical effects, series director T.J. Scott tells Playback.

It took roughly seven days of filming to complete the sequences, both on land and on the water. Three of those days were night shoots on a real ferry off the coast of Petty Harbour, which served as a double for Harbour Cove.

Series producer Patrick Cassavetti says production had some difficulty sourcing a ferry, and once they found one they were limited to three night shoots.

“That’s not really enough, but I had a skilled director who knew what he was doing, a really good physical effects team, and we made sure that they had plenty of prep time to get it all rigged and ready before it got dark,” he says.

The storm sequences were shot using practical effects as well, with VFX used sparingly to enhance the storm or water effects. Scarborough, Ont.-based manufacturer Performance Solutions built a miniature that was 1/10th the size of the actual ferry, coming to approximately 22 feet long.

The miniature was shipped to N.L., where production was able to film exterior storm sequences over two days at a St. John’s wave tank facility used to test how actual boats fare in bad weather. “They were able to duplicate the weather conditions really well, even thunder and lightning within this little wave tank,” says Scott, noting that the four-foot waves created in the tank translated to 40-foot waves on-screen thanks to the scale of the miniature.

The build cost approximately $120,000 to construct, and the total cost of filming with the miniature came to roughly $300,000, says Cassavetti. “But by comparison with a Hollywood approach that’s still cheap,” he adds.

The interior was a little more tricky. Scott says those sequences were shot on two different nights back in Ontario on a gimbal in the backlot of Shaftesbury’s Etobicoke studio. “Each one of those [sequences] are super complex, so we took a few days off in between each to mount new sections of the boat,” says Scott, who estimates that they used hundreds of gallons of water from Lake Ontario per night.

Cassavetti says the overall cost of the ferry sequences came to about $800,000, spread out over a few episodes. The total cost of shooting the season was $3.8 million per episode, he says. Financing for the season was provided by the Canada Media Fund, the Newfoundland and Labrador Film Development Corporation, the Bell Fund, the Canadian Film or Video Production Tax Credit, and Ontario Creates.

“It was a huge challenge, because they always say, ‘never film on water… It’s slow, it’s arduous, it’s difficult to do,'” says Scott. “For me, that was the fun of it.”

A version of this story appeared in Playback‘s Fall 2023 issue

Photo by T.J. Scott