Our region has the wow factor filmmakers want. It’s also home to all kinds of talent and an industry body ready to share it.

The Illawarra Flame's May 2023 cover story features Screen Illawarra – find the magazine layout here and a text-only version below

On the day the Flame meets Screen Illawarra’s new chair, Nick Bolton, and vice-chair, Essi Haukkamaa-Judge, a Paramount production is shooting down the road.

“One Night is filming right now in Thirroul with Yael Stone and Jodie Whittaker, ex-Dr Who,” Nick says.

“We’ve got several crew working on it, I’ve got a couple of friends who are acting in it. Easy Tiger is the production company; Ian Collie, who runs it, is our ambassador. He lives in Wombarra.

“It still continues to blow me away how many incredibly successful and talented people there are who live here.”

Essi says: “It’s a small industry. At some point, everyone kind of knows each other. The more people move here, we kind of form our own local community here as well.”

Leading this growing creative community is Screen Illawarra. With an enthusiastic new board elected in February, the group is all set to help give the region a “huge economic boost”, Nick says.

Prime example: Disney’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which caused a stir in Helensburgh when filmmakers took over the area around the historic ‘Glowworm Tunnels’ in October 2022.

“Those films are often $150 million, $200 million projects,” Nick says. “So if they’re down here filming for 30 days…”

Not only did Planet of the Apes bring a film crew to Helensburgh and then to Albion Park – boosting custom for local cafes and restaurants – it also provided work for local film folk.

Essi – a senior lecturer in Screen Business at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) – says: “A lot of our students worked on Planet of the Apes. They were crew members. They were part of the entry-level positions …

“I had one student who was in a production office, doing administrative work, and then another student who worked with the grip, which is the lighting and gaffer department.”

Group triples in size in three years

Screen Illawarra represents the behind-the-scenes creatives, producers and technical experts who make film and TV shows. It’s a fast-growing group.

“In the last three years, we’ve gone from 120 to 380 members, which is pretty good,” Nick says. “We want to create more for our emerging practitioners, especially the students.”

A new series of training workshops starts this month with Screen Illawarra board member Dr Aaron Burton, a documentary maker and University of Wollongong lecturer, holding a “Filming on DSLRs” workshop on Saturday, May 6.

The Screen Illawarra board of 2023 is stacked with experienced educators, including Nick, Essi, UOW’s Sue Turnbull, a senior professor of communication and media, and Ann Megalla, a producer who teaches at AFTRS.

Nick, originally from the UK, has lived in Bulli since 2015. He runs a production company, TEN ALPHAS, with his wife, Jess Milne, and teaches film studies at AFTRS, Sydney Film School and Macquarie University. Nick and Jess also have their own creative projects on the go – in February, one of their shorts screened at a packed film night at Coledale hall. “We made a film called Mate, which got long-listed for the Oscar,” Nick says.

Essi is a producer from Finland who married a Wollongong local who convinced her that our surfing beaches were better than Manly’s. “I moved here in 2016 and we live in Towradgi,” she says.

As well as teaching at AFTRS, Essi runs her own company, Greenlit Productions, and is busy developing a documentary about an Australian woman who escapes domestic violence.

“I’m also doing a PhD,” Essi says. “It’s about international co-productions, from a Finnish and an Australian point of view.”

As well as mentoring the next generation, Screen Illawarra’s leaders can also offer practical experience, as Nick did recently. “We made a music video two weeks ago for a local unsigned band. So nobody got paid. But I was able, at 48 hours notice, to get four interns to come and work, two in props and two in camera assist. It was a lot of fun.”

Nick then hired one of the interns to work with him on a commercial production in Sydney.

“Credits are our lifeblood,” he says. “It’s giving people these opportunities to get those credits and – well, you just learn by doing.

“We’re really creative tradies, aren’t we?”

Essi laughs: “Yeah, we are.”

Future jobs for students are in high-tech work, such as VFX (visual effects). That’s not to discount the desire to create something meaningful, Essi says, “It’s still there. I get excited about content. I have two kids – if I want to put my time outside my family and everything else that I do into something, it has to be something that moves me.

“But it is still a skill-based industry. A big thing for me is the educational aspect.”

A fresh voice for film and TV

Launched in 2019, Screen Illawarra is a relatively young association, founded by Anousha Zarkesh, Hiromi Matsuoka and Sandra Pires, CEO of the Yesterday Stories history app. About 70 people attended its launch party four years ago, Nick remembers. Things were looking promising.

“There’d never been an organisation to bring everyone together,” he says. “That’s the benefit of the South Coast Writers Centre or the Illawarra Flame – all these community-based organisations, bringing people together to create a voice, right?”

Then in 2020 Covid came.

Next, Nick says – with the rueful laugh of one remembering lockdown and the rise of Zoom – came “a lot of webinars”.

Essi: “Those webinars were really, really great.”

Nick: “We ran 10 one-hour sessions over 10 weeks. We did all sorts of stuff, like directing, producing, writing, career pathways, diversity inclusion, short films … One of us would chair it and we’d bring in three or four experts online.

“Anousha Zarkesh – she’s an Austinmer local, probably Australia’s premier casting director, she won four awards at the CGAs [Casting Guild of Australia] last year – was able to bring people of the calibre of [director] Wayne Blair and [Orange is the New Black star] Yael Stone.”

Dream to build content production hub

Now real-life networking events are back, there are exciting opportunities for the group to promote local talent and put the Illawarra on the map.

“It’s a great period for us,” Nick says.

Not only has the federal government’s Revive cultural policy identified a need for more regional content, Nick says introducing local content quotas for global streamers like Netflix could inject another $550 million into Australia’s screen sector.

Currently, Screen Illawarra has one part-time admin assistant, Holly Trenaman (an AFTRS graduate, writer and filmmaker who made an award-winning short called Dating Violet in Coledale in 2021). The group’s goal now is to employ a full-time director and assistant.

“Our next goal is to build the business case to get funding,” Nick says. “We’re going to become professional rather than volunteer, which is great.”

Screen Illawarra has recently used grant funding to do a feasibility study on the state of the production sector in the Illawarra.

“We were very fortunate to get Kingston Anderson to come on board as a consultant,” Nick says. “He’s the ex-CEO of the Australian Directors’ Guild, looking after all the directors, so we’re talking the top end of Australia, your Jane Campions, your Phillip Noyces, your Peter Weirs.”

The dream is to make the Illawarra a screen content production region of global significance. To raise awareness of what’s on offer, Screen Illawarra is running familiarisation tours, with the first one in December 2022. “That was so successful because it was the first time that the four councils – Wollongong, Kiama, Shoalhaven and Shellharbour – had really worked together with us,” says Nick, who acted as tour guide on the bus.

“We had six production companies come down. We put them on the bus at Symbio all the way down to Shoalhaven, and just wowed them. The cemetery [at Scarborough] was really well received. We had a huge tour at BlueScope.

“Having a singular point of contact in a region means we can help these producers – just make their lives easier. We can help with cast, with crew, and all those support services like accommodation, catering, cleaning, tradies to build sets.

“Since that familiarisation tour, Easy Tiger are filming One Night and Jungle have come down for a second visit – for another show that I can’t reveal. And we’ve been getting other inquiries.”

Show business, however, can be a slow business.

“The average feature film takes seven years to make,” Nick says. “Three and a half years of development… It’s quite a ridiculous industry really, because development you’re generally unpaid for.”

The reality is a life split between workhorse and unicorn projects, says Nick, currently working on his ‘unicorn’, a feature film script he’s developing via a South Coast Writers Centre course with veteran director Graham Thorburn.

“This is an interesting thing about the life of an independent filmmaker,” he says. “We all have to do other jobs, which we love doing. I’ve been in Canberra this week, filming commercial content on palliative care.

“It’s very easy to talk about the feature films because they’re cool and sexy, right?

“But most of our members have multiple revenue streams. We make a lot of advertising, social media, training and corporate content, case studies, promotional videos, games and web series, and that’s kind of like our bread and butter.

“So what we also want to do as an organisation is highlight those people locally, so that our local big corporates like Mercer and Peoplecare and UOW and BlueScope don’t use Sydney production people – they’re aware of the local talent here.”

Essi: “And new emerging talent as well. Every year there’s a new run of people who need those opportunities. We mentor them in Screen Illawarra, connect them with the right people. So that’s why the networking events are really valuable.

“The best part is you meet people.”

Anyone at any level in film and TV is welcome to join Screen Illawarra and attend events including the May 6 workshop in ‘Filming on DSLRs’. Visit www.screenillawarra.com

CREDITS TO…

The 2023 Screen Illawarra board is stacked with local talent. It includes Nick Bolton (chair), Essi Haukkamaa-Judge (vice chair & public officer); Gia Frino (treasurer) and Sarina Crocco (secretary). General board members are Ann Megalla, Brittany Pike, Sharon Lewis, Aaron Burton and Susan Turnbull.