![]() Glass, it turns out, is a very silly material to work with. It is, almost to the point of redundancy. Which isn’t to say that what they do isn’t incredible. They are all, without exception, so self-consciously “creative” that it makes you worry about a potential deficit of drama teachers in Canada. ![]() Leah looks like the presenter of a late-night 2002 Channel 4 awards show about architecture. Edgar is a mid-90s skater boy Janusz is a Peaky Blinder Kevin has been dragged by the goatee from 1967 San Francisco. ![]() What I love about the contestants is that they all appear to have been plucked from different but very specific eras in time. You got to hand it to them: the judges ponder one of the contestant’s creations. However, that said, Blown Away does seem to have exclusively recruited from the jerkier end of the spectrum. I am sure plenty of glass-blowers exist in the world who aren’t jerks. Obviously this is a judgment that I have made from watching a television programme, which is a bit like watching DuckTales and coming to the conclusion that all waterfowl are embittered millionaires. I think all glass-blowers might be jerks. However, my fascination has another strand, and here it is. Everything about glass-blowing, at every step, screams: “This is not for you!” So on this level, it’s incredible to watch talented people do something that you could never do. The processes can only be achieved after years of intensive training. This isn’t MasterChef, where you can wander into the kitchen after an episode and replicate some of the techniques in your own home. My fascination in part stems from the fact that glass-blowing is an intricate, high-level skill that combines artistic vision with physical heft. I am only writing this to make you watch it, so I can have someone to talk to about it. When the filming of ‘Blown Away’ takes place, the town of Hamilton also serves as a temporary home for the entire cast and crew of the show, with everyone residing in a nearby hotel.And yet I am fascinated by it. We should also mention that the students of Sheridan College appear on the show as assistants to the competitors so as to attain first-hand experience in their industry. Therefore, after being transformed into a place with ten reheating furnaces, two glass-melting furnaces, and a studio space, this warehouse, located on Imperial Street, is indeed the largest glass-blowing shop in North America. To ensure that everything in the Hot Shop was safe, easy to use, and yet pleasing to the eye, Marblemedia roped in Toronto’s Sheridan College’s Craft and Design Glass Studio team to help conceptualize, custom-design, and develop the warehouse. Hamilton is about an hour’s drive from Toronto, in the southwest direction. Thus, it also ended up being the only place where all the show’s drama, suspense, and work takes place. In fact, this Hot Shop, located in the city of Hamilton in Ontario, Canada, was just an abandoned warehouse up until the point it was found and converted to become a place for ten glass-blowers to safely work in by the show’s production company, Marblemedia. In the words of host Nick Uhas, ‘Blown Away’ is filmed in “North America’s largest Hot Shop.” But we’ll be honest, while that may be true, it is not actually real – not for commercial, day-to-day use anyway. ![]() And now, if you, like us, are curious to know precisely where the filming of this heated program, all pun intended, took place, we’ve got you covered. ![]() But now, with ‘Blown Away’ becoming the world’s first production about glass-blowing, we know for a fact that they weren’t wrong. After the entertainment industry decided that a reality competition series can be about pretty much anything, we got shows like ‘Ink Master’ (for tattoos), ‘Skin Wars’ (for body paint), and ‘Holey Moley’ (for mini-golf). ![]()
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