Wellington's Roller-coaster Film Scene

The Wellington tradition of feast or famine continues. Although we’ve hosted a nice wee selection of medium-sized TVC’s and corporate shoots over the summer – not to mention a stills photo shoot with [name redacted – Ed] that reportedly had a budget that, in NZ terms, would have paid for a modest feature film – the big news down here at the head of the fish is still the international feature films.

Ghost in the Shell is simply a beast. All of Stone Street is booked, and the overflow is going out to Avalon, who up until recently were also hosting an apparently endless series of pick-ups for Disney’s Pete’s Dragon and a couple of extremely hush-hush extra shots for one of those projects that everyone knows the name of but no one is allowed to talk about.

Post-Ghost (at time of writing, some time in late May or early June), it sounds as though Stone Street will roll straight into another behemoth of a project. Again, we all know what it’s called, but we aren’t able to breathe a word about it. And all of this while Avatar is still in a holding pattern waiting to land, and persistent rumours of HALO the TV series still echo around the cafes of Miramar.

The upshot of all this activity has been that, for the first time in years, Wellington is running more than one ‘big’ crew at a time. So the demand for experienced workers has never been higher.

Crew Wellington is humming, the phone is ringing, and even yours truly has been back out on set carrying sandbags and whistling a happy tune.

All we need now is a local TV show to base itself here (let’s not forget that Avalon is still the best purpose-built TV production facility in the country), and then I reckon we could start calling ourselves a sustainable filmmaking economy again.

But until the local work does start to come back to Wellington on a regular basis, it’s a roller-coaster ride that we may as well just enjoy while it lasts.

Graeme Tuckett, Wellington branch member