Videos

Paperback Hero

Feature Film
Hugh Jackman’s first feature film was mostly shot in Nindigully, 8 hours west of Brisbane. The location consisted of a pub and a lot of red dirt until The Boomerang Cafe was designed and built as a working concern for the film. Only the giant steel rooftop boomerangs remain now.

Amy

Feature Film
Amy has won many awards overseas for the story’s compassionate yet humorous study of the deaf and mute little heroine. The city street was designed and built amongst existing buildings at a disused armaments factory in Melbourne, thus giving total control of people and traffic in the precinct. The featured houses were also the interior sets, enabling freedom of movement and choreography for camera.

Child Star

Feature Film
The story of Shirley Temple’s career in Hollywood, re-creating the Fox Studio lot of the 1930’s, and many of Shirley’s famous studio sets. Over 50 period sets filmed in just 5 weeks. A delightful lesson in how apparently elaborate settings were created with elegant simplicity all those years ago.

Collision Course

Feature Film
The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course is a 2002 Australian comedy-adventure film based on the nature documentary series The Crocodile Hunter, starring Steve Irwin and his wife Terri Irwin. The Irwins play themselves filming an episode of The Crocodile Hunter while trying to protect a crocodile.

K-9

Television Series
A creaky old mansion, a space-time machine, a robot dog and a mad professor – all in the future – what more could a designer hope for in a story outline? The featured sets are a three-story early 19th Century mansion, a cobblestone London street and a disused underground tunnel system. This teenage Dr Who spin-off series was mainly written by Bob Baker (Wallace and Grommitt).

Matching Jack

Feature Film
Jon’s fourth feature film collaboration with Nadia Tass and David Parker. A contemporary story about a mother’s search for a bone marrow donor to save her young son, Matching Jack was shot entirely on carefully chosen and customized locations in Melbourne during the winter of 2009.

The Eye of the Storm

In the Sydney suburb of Centennial Park, two nurses, a housekeeper and a solicitor attend to Elizabeth Hunter as her expatriate son and daughter convene at her deathbed. But in dying, as in living, Mrs Hunter remains a powerful force on those who surround her.

Based on the novel by Nobel Prize winner Patrick White, THE EYE OF THE STORM is a savage exploration of family relationships – and the sharp undercurrents of love and hate, comedy and tragedy, which define them.

Jon designed the flashback sequence set in the early i960’s at the Hunters’ island holiday home, and the ensuing cyclone devastation.

Drive Hard

Feature Film

Mad Max

Feature Film
An apocalyptic vision set in the wastelands of Australia. This iconic film set a new tone for Australian cinema, spawning a worldwide cult following and launching the careers of much of its cast and crew. Filmed in and around a virtually unrecognisable Melbourne, the production and design values remain a hot topic amongst cinephiles and academia alike.