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 ...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
01/06/2026
January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026
Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Zero in on one that says yes (and no)
Andy Marken May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Hero image courtesy of Deposit Photos
For content creators the most difficu...
29/05/2026
With InfoComm 2026 just weeks away, NDI is giving attendees plenty of reasons to...
29/05/2026
Reaffirming a partnership that has defined Canadian sports broadcasting since 19...
29/05/2026
Mobile/tablet is No. 2 device for watching TV, suggesting that the sports-production industry needs to take another look at the format
Ring Digital's Sprin...
29/05/2026
Berliner Ensemble, one of Berlin's five major theater companies, has expande...
29/05/2026
Solid State Logic will showcase its new compact, fly-away TCA Tour audio product...
29/05/2026
Gerald (Jerry) Pierce, a pioneering technologist who helped shape the digital transformation of the motion picture industry, passed away last month on April 12 ...
29/05/2026
Paramount+ will be the English-language U.S. home for Barclays Women's Super...
29/05/2026
Further strengthening its virtualisation strategy to fully support broadcasters ...
29/05/2026
Swiss broadcaster Canal Alpha has deployed Harmonic's award-winning, software-based XOS Advanced Media Processor to modernize playout operations across cant...
29/05/2026
PTZOptics will showcase a new generation of intelligent video workflows at InfoComm 2026, June 17-19, Las Vegas. Visitors to booth N8227 will see how PTZOptics ...
29/05/2026
Arizona's Family has launched the Arizona's Family Sports (AZFS) streaming app, a new direct-to-consumer destination for live, local sports. The app is ...
29/05/2026
Starting in 2027, DAZN will be the exclusive home of The Canadian Football Leagu...
29/05/2026
Comcast Business has detailed the advanced network infrastructure it has deploye...
29/05/2026
In two-day event, leaders from academia and industry explored solutions to chall...
29/05/2026
The Basketball Tournament (TBT), now entering their 13th year of competition, ha...
29/05/2026
Roku has launched FOX One as a Premium Subscription on The Roku Channel in the U.S. Roku customers can now subscribe to FOX One using their Roku account for liv...
29/05/2026
In its sixth year, the broadcaster's coverage has become a global brand and ...
29/05/2026
Ratings Roundup is a rundown of recent ratings news and is derived from press re...
29/05/2026
The days are getting longer, the temperatures are rising, and playlists are filling up for the season. With summer around the corner, Spotify's global edito...
29/05/2026
New retro-inspired MPC announced
There are few devices that have gained the status held by Akai Pro's MPC range, and in recent years, the company have s...
29/05/2026
Save up to 30 on acclaimed titles
Following a successful launch at Superbooth 2026, Bjooks have revealed that they will be continuing the Kickstarter campa...
29/05/2026
Binaural monitoring application improved
Genelec have just released an update that brings some powerful new features to their HRTF-based binaural headphone ...
29/05/2026
6 June 2026 at SAE Institute, London, UK
IMSTA FESTA 2026 is almost upon us, with some of the biggest names in pro-audio set to descend upon SAE Institute i...
29/05/2026
Gerald (Jerry) Pierce, a pioneering technologist who helped shape the digital transformation of the motion picture industry, died April 12, 2026, at his home in...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Comparing 5 AI Video Enhancers for Restoring Old Video Quality
Kate Luvis May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Digitizing VHS, MiniDV, and other legacy formats doe...
29/05/2026
Studio Hamburg Builds New Post Pipeline with DaVinci Resolve Studio
Brie Clayton May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Workflow replaces a patchwork of legacy tools...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
At the Intersection of Music and Dance, an Epic Collaboration Boston Conservatory musicians and dancers found creative parallels in their recent performance o...
29/05/2026
May 29 2026, 09:00 (PDT) Dolby and rednote Bring More Immersive Storytelling to...
29/05/2026
Something fundamental has shifted in how people consume media. Audiences aren't abandoning television or radio content; they're just expanding how, wher...
29/05/2026
Youtube exclusive special drops today
Watch now
UKTV today announces another e...
29/05/2026
Back to All News
The Official Trailer of Physical 100 Italy, on Netflix From Se...
29/05/2026
Genelec announces V2.1 for Aural ID binaural headphone monitoring application posted: 29/05/2026
Aural ID 2.1 enhances binaural monitoring for stereo and ...
29/05/2026
At just 20 years old, Sean Melia from Summerhill Co. Meath has been revealed as the winner of Super Garden 2026. Sean is the youngest ever contestant and winner...
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
