During the last days of shooting Sex Traffic in Halifax, executive producers Wayne Grigsby and David MacLeod of Big Motion Pictures were faced with the King Kong of snowstorms. Production on the $11.5-million miniseries looked like it was going to be halted as more than three feet of snow covered Halifax just four days before the shoot was set to wrap Feb. 24.

U.K. executive producer Michele Buck and producer Derek Wax of Meridian Broadcasting, unfamiliar with Canadian winters, were ‘slack-jawed’ when the entire crew along with 75 extras braved the storm and showed up to shoot a big charity dinner scene.

Afterwards, the producers decided to take a day off, hoping the streets would be cleared by the time they had to shoot an exterior scene in downtown Halifax, but were not dismayed when they found the city still buried in snow. They brought in front-end loaders and Bob Cats to shovel out a block of the city and shooting continued.

‘Sex Traffic was a great experience. We managed to work around the storm of the century and wrap on time and on budget,’ said Grigsby via cell phone while scouting locations for the upcoming Trudeau prequel, which he says will start prep this month.

Before moving to Halifax, Sex Traffic shot for eight weeks in Romania and London. The pair of two-hours, penned by Abi Morgan, for CBC and Channel 4 in the U.K., is about the $7-billion underground sex trade, in which women from around the world are forced into prostitution.

Directed by David Yates and lensed by Chris Seager, Sex Traffic stars Wendy Crewson as the head of a U.S. defence contractor’s charity foundation and British actor John Simm (Human Traffic), who plays a researcher investigating the plight of two young women sold into sexual slavery. Other Canadian cast members include Luke Kirby (Mambo Italiano) and Maury Chaykin (Nero Wolfe). BMP plans to deliver Sex Traffic to CBC in late August.