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
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
06/09/2026
June 9 2026, 23:00 (PDT) Dolby and MagentaTV Bring Fans Closer to the FIFA Worl...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
06/07/2026
Long-developed relationships and informal access, three production models, and c...
06/07/2026
The deal follows Lumine's recent acquisition of Synamedia's video-networ...
06/07/2026
This former SportsCenter producer is shaping local-team studio coverage to surro...
06/07/2026
IMS Productions and FOX Sports deployed more than 100 cameras, 32 onboard feeds,...
06/07/2026
Lumine Group Inc. has announced the completion of its acquisition of the Video Network Business from Synamedia. The business will operate as a standalone compan...
06/07/2026
NASCAR has announced a content and commercial partnership with Motorsport Network, a motorsports and automotive media platform, to distribute NASCAR original co...
06/07/2026
Versant Media Group has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Full Swing, a sports technology company, from Bruin Capital and a group of minority investor...
06/07/2026
DAZN has announced global broadcast rights to 3ICE, a professional hockey format featuring three skaters and a goalkeeper per side, with no power plays or offsi...
06/07/2026
Bundle gains 100 new synths & more
Synth Anthology 5 the largest and most feature-packed edition of UVI's hardware synth emulation bundle, bringing toge...
06/07/2026
Available now via free firmware update
MOTU have just announced that three of their popular audio interfaces now boast official Milan Certification. The 16A...
06/07/2026
Rohde & Schwarz completes Hunter Preliminary Design Review for the Integrated Co...
06/07/2026
The R&S IMAGER from Rohde & Schwarz uses millimeter wave imaging to inspect the ...
06/07/2026
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
06/07/2026
Digital Domain Appoints Industry Veteran Patrick Davenport as Executive Vice Pre...
06/07/2026
Gravity Media USA appoints Brittney Boston as Head of Business Development
Brie Clayton July 6, 2026
0 Comments
The strategic new appointment supports...
06/07/2026
Remote Editing Without Cloud Storage in Resolve
Michael Cioni July 6, 2026
0 Comments
This is a step-by-step guide that demonstrates how to setup your...
06/07/2026
Automatic Caption Translation in Adobe Premiere Pro
Colin Smith July 6, 2026
0 Comments
Here I showcase the innovative automatic caption translation f...
06/07/2026
Flavor's First Ever Managing Director Neal Cohen Retires; Longstanding Execu...
06/07/2026
How Adam Rosenwach Pivoted from Music to Medtech Without Missing a Beat What do the rehearsal room and the boardroom have in common? More than you might think...
06/07/2026
Zhongyi Optics unveils the Dreamy Zone T1 FF Cine Lens Series on Indiegogo with ...
06/07/2026
Techtel debuts insyght: making ST 2110 media discovery easy
intellisphereinsyght2026
6 July Written By Suzanne Costello
Sydney, Australia - 06 July 2026 T...
06/07/2026
Monday 6 July 2026
Sky agrees to acquire ITV Media & Entertainment, creating a ...
06/07/2026
Fresh from his World Cup heroics with Cabo Verde, Roberto Pico' Lopes will join the RT panel for Argentina v Egypt tomorrow and for the England v Norway q...
06/07/2026
Nations have long invested in domestic infrastructure to advance their economies, protect and use their data, and take advantage of technology opportunities in ...
06/07/2026
Every year, the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) reveals where thousands of AI researchers have decided to put their work.
This year's ...
06/07/2026
A death can be unsuspicious, but it has to be explained
What happened to Ke...
05/07/2026
We've gone to another level of integrating the graphics into the set architecture' - Zac Fields, SVP, Graphic Technology and Integration, FOX Sports...
05/07/2026
Browser-based and desktop apps available
Digital Sunset Studios have been busy working on an interesting project: a free software tool that provides compute...
04/07/2026
When Canada qualified for the FIFA World Cup 2026, OneSoccer knew this wasn'...
04/07/2026
Celebrates company's 80th anniversary
Rhodes have recently revealed that they will be producing a limited run of electric pianos in celebration of their...
04/07/2026
Blackmagic Design Cameras Empower Youth Broadcasting Program
Brie Clayton July 3, 2026
0 Comments
Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro and Blackmagi...
04/07/2026
iZotope Joins Boris FX
Boris Yamnitsky July 3, 2026
0 Comments
iZotope, the team behind RX and Ozone, is joining Boris FX. A letter from founder Boris...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
03/07/2026
New bundle & three Single Packs
Continuing to expand their already sizeable orchestral collection, VSL's latest release introduces three new Single Pack...
03/07/2026
Venue installs new ATC-equipped control room
LSO St Luke's, a unique music venue that also serves as the home of the London Symphony Orchestra, have rec...
03/07/2026
Caden Pearson appointed new Commissioning Editor for NITV
3 July, 2026
Media releases
National Indigenous Television (NITV) has strengthened its commitment...
03/07/2026
1 February 2023
SHARE Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email
Munich, Germany, 1st February 2023: Cinegy GmbH, the premier provider of software technology for digit...
03/07/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
03/07/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
03/07/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
03/07/2026
Death Star
Andy Marken July 2, 2026
0 Comments
Look, I can't get involved. I've got work to do. It's not that I like the Empire; I hate i...
03/07/2026
Berklee's New Visual Identity: Honoring Our History, Building for What's...
03/07/2026
Scripps Research scientists awarded $2M to advance global disease surveillance Two Gates Foundation grants will expand wastewater surveillance and AI-driven dis...
03/07/2026
Joan Pulupa joins Scripps Research faculty to study the organization of DNA in brain cells and its links to neurodegeneration Using smell-sensing neurons and ad...
02/07/2026
Entering her senior year, this hometown girl is paving a career in live sports production gaining experience in replay and audio and as a TD
In the live-sports...
02/07/2026
In-venue and creative video staffers at the professional and collegiate level ha...
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
