The £10 ticket to sunny Australia was a no-brainer for people looking to escape the post-war gloom and grey skies of Great Britain. However, the weather waiting for the cast and crew when they filmed Ten Pound Poms in Sydney last year was worse than what they left behind, writes Marlon Szczepankiewicz
By Contributor
Published: June 1, 2023
The £10 ticket to sunny Australia was a no-brainer for people looking to escape the post-war gloom and grey skies of Great Britain. However, the weather waiting for the cast and crew when they filmed Ten Pound Poms in Sydney last year was worse than what they left behind, writes Marlon Szczepankiewicz
target=_blank title=Share on LinkedIn class=share-linkedin>
The timing of the BBC's new Sunday night drama Ten Pound Poms couldn't be better. With Britain facing its own boat crisis and calls from some quarters to introduce an Australian-style point-based system , you wouldn't be far wrong if you thought the series from Eleven Film starring Michelle Keegan was exploiting the zeitgeist permeating 2023 Britain.
I think the specifics of an Australian-style points system being mooted was coincidental but the fact that immigration has been such a prickly and so much talked about topic over the last few years - that bit is quite deliberate, says director, Jamie Stone. I liked that it's an inverted immigrant story. It reminds us that we were economic migrants once.
For those unfamiliar with the subject matter, the Australian government introduced the Assisted Passage Migration Scheme in 1945, which allowed migrants to move Down Under for £10, in a bid to increase the population.
The series looks and feels ridiculously authentic, making the viewer feels like it was shot in the era it is set. Yet despite the technology at their disposal, Stone and the DoP, Meg White, avoided blue and green screens where they could.
We tried not to rely on it as we wanted all of our thresholds between the hut and the outside to be real and to do some iris pulls to take us over those thresholds, Stone explains. All of the vehicle stuff is shot on low-loaders and car mounts because we didn't want to have any blue or green screen there. We shot on the Alex Mini LF because I like the larger sensor and what it does to the depth of field. We shot with some Panaspeed lenses that have quite vintage characteristics and they were slightly detuned, which I think helped us get away from an overly digital look.
The visual inspirations that Stone and White talked about early on were from films of the 1970s. The sequences on Terry's work site were inspired by the drilling scenes in Five Easy Pieces, starring Jack Nicholson, Stone adds. There's also an amazing Australian film from the '70s called Wake in Fright, which I hadn't seen before that Meg introduced me to. Again, it has this earthy, sweaty texture to it that we really wanted, especially for the pub scenes.
Stone says that in an ideal world it would have been lovely to shoot this on celluloid, but that wasn't impossible due to cost and lack of availability of labs. As far as I'm aware Australia didn't have the facilities, so we went with the digital workflow and tried to gear everything toward that kind of feel, he continues. It's just not practically possible anymore. However, we did all that we could to get away from an overly digital look, from the choice of lenses to wherever possible having atmospherics even very lightly in the air just to kind of give us a softer and more lived-in feel.
In the grade, Stone and his team used a heavier film grain than he'd done in any job before. It felt right, he says. The nice thing about the Alexa is having the latitude to play with that as well. It's also the first thing I shot properly in HDR, too. That helps give it a slightly more celluloid-like range in the image.
The team was mostly based around Sydney at Scheyville National Park, which was once a prisoner-of-war internment camp and latterly used to process migrants. The rationale was to use as many existing structures as possible.
Most of the huts were gone so we rebuilt them on the footprints of where the old ones had been, Stone says. There are two remaining huts there and ours were indistinguishable. We also filmed in a town called Carcoar a five-hour drive from Sydney across the Blue Mountains. Once you get across the Blue Mountains the landscape just opens up and becomes a lot more rural, open and empty. It had the colours Meg and I wanted.
At the camp, a number of 2D wooden huts were built for wide shots to get the hut numbers up. Australian VFX vendor Slate expanded the camp further in aerial shots using digital huts and crowd simulation, which was also employed for the boat arrival sequence. But outside of these moments, VFX were kept to a minimum. However, such was the unforeseen bad weather in wait for it Australia, a lot of sky manipulation and other weather-related chicanery was deployed.
The weather in Australia was pretty horrendous, so we had to work quite hard on the shoot and in post to try and keep it as a sunny show as that was a huge part of the pitch, he explains. Most of the shoot was in Australia and we had biblical floods and hailstorms, snow and high winds, thunder and a lot of rain that we had to dance around the whole time.
That said, the production team managed to use the inclement weather to its advantage. My philosophy has always been take what you can with the weather, Stone says. If you don't have cover then you just have to forge on through and work with the weather you're given. It was hard on this job because the dialogue referenced the sun the fact they were coming from rainy Britain to sunny Australia.
To remedy this, the decision was taken to supplement overcast exteriors with
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
28/08/2025
IBC stand 5.F81
Wowza to Reveal Next-Gen Video Streaming Innovations at IBC 2025
Amsterdam, August 28, 2025 Wowza, a leader in video streaming infrastructur...
The £10 ticket to sunny Australia was a no-brainer for people looking to escape the post-war gloom and grey skies of Great Britain. However, the weather waiting for the cast and crew when they filmed Ten Pound Poms in Sydney last year was worse than what they left behind, writes Marlon Szczepankiewicz
