Hot on the heels of announcing the Canadian version of Big Brother coming to Slice, executive producer John Brunton says they’ve already been overwhelmed by hopeful contestants and hosts.

“What’s amazing we’ve just had the most bizarrely aggressive response since that press release went out yesterday,” said Brunton, CEO of Insight Productions.

“I think I’ve had 10 emails already from people that want to host the show, some known and others who have been in the news lately, and we’ve got hundreds of emails from people that want to be in the show,” he says.

“People have been sending photos in. Weird photos. I know Canadians are considered to be shy, but we definitely aren’t seeing that.”

Brunton says the company had its first pre-production meeting about the show on Thursday and are hoping to potentially start shooting early in 2013, with a location somewhere in Toronto.

The key to any reality show is casting and Brunton is looking forward to that.

“The casting is going to be so much fun, because it’s kind of hot mess TV a bit,” he says. “We have experience doing that from our other shows, but this is different from looking for people who can dance or sing.”

They want to cast as wide a net as possible but are still firming up details as to how it might unfold.

Insight Productions is partnering with Endemol, the company that has spread the mammoth franchise around the world. Insight has a long history with bringing and creating reality formats in this country, with credits like Battle of the Blades, Canadian Idol and Canada’s Got Talent, but Brunton says those shows do not compare to the scope of this production.

“This show is a major viewing commitment, three hours a week, but the complications of pulling it off as a production are really exciting to us. It’s new technology, it’s building a house inside a studio that you can shoot in, that people have to live in, that has real plumbing and all that stuff,” he says.

“There’s something really fascinating to us about the format and to us it’s a big, big, big show. It shoots for over 70 days, 24-7, and it never stops.”