The biggest challenge for "Ned
Kelly" production designer Stephen Jones Evans was
recreating the type of landscape that existed in
Victoria during the late 1800s.
"There was kind
of a war going on back then, which was parallel to the
war that the Kelly gang had with the authorities," he
explains. "It was an ecological war - they were denuding
and cutting down forests and trees as fast as they
could.
"People were actually given incentives to
do that. They were given plots of land and they had to
clear the land in a certain amount of time, otherwise it
was taken away from them."
For this reason, Jones
Evans did not want to use untouched bushland for the
film, but rather sought out a landscape that was ravaged
and partially destroyed. "We didn't want pristine
beautiful wilderness. We wanted a darker, more brooding
kind of landscape to undercut the story."
The
Victorian country towns involved in the story also
presented problems. Four towns are focused on
particularly - Greta, where the Kellys lived; Euroa,
where the gang rob a bank; Jerilderie, where another
bank is robbed; and Glenrowan, where the climax of the
film takes place.
While the latter three towns
still exist (there is very little left at Greta), they
were too modern in appearance to be used in the film.
Instead, other locations were used such as the central
Victorian town of Clunes, which didn't require so much
work to be dressed up as an 1870s rural town. One end of
Clunes stands in for Euroa, while the other stands in
for Jerilderie.
"The great thing about Clunes was
that we basically just re-painted, aged and re-signed a
lot of the existing architecture," Jones Evans explains.
"We didn't build an enormous amount of new stuff. Only
about five facades were built, mainly to cover something
that was non-period or to extend a piece of the town
where we needed more coverage or more range or more
depth."
Although much of the architecture
required little work in places like Clunes, some digital
effects were still required in post-production. "Modern
things likes signs, TV aerials and some of the
backgrounds have been removed using CGI (computer
generated imagery), so there are definitely CGI elements
to this film."
Jones Evans is pleased that his
original vision for the landscape and townships in
"Ned Kelly" have become realities in the finished
film.
"The most you can ever ask for in terms of
production design is having a vision and seeing that
vision end up on screen, pretty much in the way you
envisioned it, and it feels like that has happened with
this film for us." | |
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The Glenrowan shootout, the most
complicated scene in the film, involved 350 cast and
crew |
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