Making the pictures
Television is a visual medium - take away the pictures and you have radio! Frontier of Dreams makes full use of an extraordinary selection of old film and photographs. But just as important has been the search to find locations where historic events took place and then to decide on a visual language and style to breathe life into the stories that belong there.
Finding things to film
Inside the walls of museums big and small, within their
collections of artefacts, are some of New Zealand's most treasured
possessions - the Treaty of Waitangi, the women's suffrage
petition, diaries and letters from soldiers in the land wars of the
1860s through to Vietnam in the 1960s, early maps and paintings,
public and private photographs of great events and small personal
moments, and archive film, much of it never seen before& the
oldest piece of film shot in New Zealand, the rarest colour
footage, and footage shot by families of their lives
Finding people to film
Faces to put to the many voices that make up the series;
people to tell their stories and our stories. Stories about
family histories and ancestors, about their history and New
Zealand's history, and how they interconnect
Finding places to film
Led by the historians' founding essays and the
production's research, Frontier of Dreams travelled New Zealand and
the world, from the Old World of Britain and Europe, to the islands
of the Pacific and the museums and universities of the United
States, to bring pictures of the places and artefacts and people
that influenced New Zealand and its story - from the house where
Captain Cook lived in Whitby to the site of the oldest Polynesian
village every found, from the decks of one of the busiest (and
slowest) U.K. immigrant ships of the 1880s to the killing fields of
World War 1's Western Front.
Camera and Sound
There is an art to capturing the image and sounds of a
scene or artefact, a specialist or person with a special story to
tell. Frontier of Dreams has used the most experienced camera
and sound crews. Together they developed different ways of
filming, recording and editing the pictures and sounds that go to
make up the programme. The result is a unique interpretation
and vision of our country and its people, a fresh way of seeing
things.
