The Sydney Morning Herald du lieu suivant : Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 42

THE GUIDE 5 li 5a I OMi5 the shots well composed and hardly ever hand-held. Each scene is filmed several times and the different points of view are edited together on computers later. The single camera method means the sets can have four walls instead of the usual three. Once inside the Pacific Drive set there is nothing to suggest you're not in a real apartment The powerpoints all work and so do the taps and ovens. Open a fridge and youll feel that cold blast and smell that vague rotting stink.

There are real books on bedside tables (Pacific Drive characters chose to read Kinky Friedman, Emily Bronte and Camille Paglia) and on the desks of the offices of the fictional company Body Beat Swimwear, you'll find rubber stamps and printed business cards, complete down to the Pacific Drive address. The set designers and dressers have gone into detail which probably won't be appreciated by the audience, but nevertheless has a psychological effect on the cast Wakeham acknowledges that budget constraints have forced him to compromise and shoot more than he would like to. He also admits that if it wasn't for indoor merchandising deals and product placements, the sets would not have been able to be built the way they were. Wakeham also regrets that the marketing situation has meant he can't use the wide format capability of the brand-new digital cameras, something which would have really made people take notice. But despite the extra work involved with shooting TV hours with filmic techniques, the actors say they like this method because there's only one camera to concentrate on and their director is down on the set with them, not talking to them through a squawk box from some hidden control room.

Both crew and cast are prepared to make the sacrifice because of the quality final product Whether or not Pacific Drive is as novel as it is claimed to be remains to be seen. The Guide has only seen a few minutes of the closely guarded footage and that was for assessment of the visual style, insufficient time to make any judgment about plot and character. By combining quality camera work with contrasting, film noir lighting, the new look of the brand-new digital cameras, Wakeham has achieved a new look unique for soap. But whether or not this is enough to hold an audience is another thing. afternoon timeslot but this would have meant the network missed out on the all-important Australian drama content points.

Bevan Lee, the program's executive creative consultant (yes, he knows the title is terribly West Coast), describes the show as "Melrose with soul" and "a cross between Melrose Place and Tales of the But Noble says it's impossible to compete with the multimillion dollar American program: "Bud-getwise, Melrose is in excess of a million dollars an episode. You can't come near that. But we wanted to make a sophisticated serial." He says Pacific Drive is "slightly more expensive" than the average serial but will not reveal specifics. While all the characters live on the Gold Coast, they are not bound together by geography alone. Episode one opens when Sonia Kings-ley, one of the coast's most powerful identities, is brutally murdered on her morning jog (she should have stuck with power walking it's much safer).

From there, the disparate characters are drawn together in what's known in the business as "a tangled web of lust, greed, intrigue and Sure, there's a bit of Twin Peaks in the mix, but executive producer Nick McMahon assures that the murder is merely a device to let us get to know the characters. Whereas by the time we found out who clingwrapped Laura Palmer the plot of Twin Peaks had fizzled, by week 14 of Pacific Drive, when the murder is solved, McMahon is certain that the audience will be beguiled by "the characters, the intricacies and basically who's up who which is what soap's all McMahon says Pacific Drive isn't afraid to confront the issues facing twentysomethings (although he admits he's a bit past all that himself), but they will be handled "not in a preaching sense, but in a message "This is the first long-running positive depiction of a lesbian on Australian TV," boasts Andrew Mercado, the unit publicist. "There was the Freak in Prisoner, but that was negative. There was also Vicki Stafford in The Box, but she went bi. Our lesbian is going to stay a lesbian." There is also a character in the series is who is HIV-positive.

McMahon promises a tasteful approch to sex: "If there's a bare butt, or some flesh, it's in total context There's nothing gratuitous in it at all." And rest assured that the homosexuality will be dealt with in a "totally acceptable, natural, normal While Pacific Drive welcomes take a tanning break. The main players A guide to the Pacific Drivers: CALLIE MACRAE (played by Danielle Spencer): A dynamic young paramedic hooked on adrenalin. She lives fast and enjoys every minute of it. She is in love with RICK CARLYLE. RICK CARLYLE (Andre Eikmeir): He uses wit and charm to get what he wants, from a real-estate sale to a woman.

He is on his way to the top, determined to leave behind the poverty of his past. TREY DEVLIN (Lloyd Morris): A outspoken radio star who wields power and influence with wit and panache. He's even got a conscience and is accused of murder when his millionaire wife and boss SONIA KINGSLEY is murdered. GEORGINA ELLIS (Kate Raison): Devastated by the death of her elder sister SONIA, GEORGINA refuses to run her sister's media empire, then has to deal with the intimate attentions of police detective MARTIN HARRIS. MARTIN HARRIS (Joss McWilliam): The police detective who falls in love with a murder suspect, GEORGINA.

LAURA HARRIS (Simone Buchanan): Making a new life for herself with a new lover, identity and brother. AMBER KINGSLEY (Christine Stephen-Daly): SONIA's daughter, TREY's step-daughter, she's a manipulative, seductive chameleon who wants money and men, in that order. ADAM STEPHENS (Mark Constable): Successful, dynamic corporate lawyer who wants to chuck it all in and lay on the beach. BETHANY DANIELS (Melissa Tkautz): Beautiful young model who is dumped by RICK CARLYLE. BRETT BARRETT (Erik Thomson): A young and ambitious charter boat owner who was having an affair with SONIA.

ZOE MARSHALL (Libby Tanner): A lifelong gal pal who gets a big crush on CALLIE. LUKE BOWMAN (Steve J. Harman): A lifeguard who has overcome an Olympic failure but whose stolen car is used to run down SONIA. JOEL RITCHIE (Adrian Lee): An outsider who lives off his wits" when his meal ticket, AMBER, fails to get her money. TIM BROWNING (Damn Klimek): A young Canandian backpacker lured to the Drive by surf, sand and the lifestyle of the beaches, only to have his innocent dream corrupted by life in the shadows of Pacific Drive.

Steve Harman and Libby Tanner lesbians with open arms, the cliches which seem to define Australian soap will be turned away at the door. According to Mercado, the rules are: No pets. No parents. No kids. No cafes.

Apply these to a show such as Home and Away and you'd be left with 22 minutes of quality blank screen. Unlike Paradise Beach, PBII does not relying on spunk quotient This time, acting talent is not being sacrificed for glamour and the producers have made the novel decision to restrict the major roles to actors and not models. McMahon believes that even though the cast of Paradise Beach was "a spectacular-looking the show was restricted by their acting capabilities. Cast members include Simone Buchanan (Hey Kate Raison (A Country Practice) and Melissa "Read My Lips" Tkautz (E Street). The only non-trained actor in the cast is Steve Harman, a stunt man who was discovered while working at the Movie World Western Action Show.

While it remains to be seen if Pacific Drive really covers new ground in terms of content and acting HOLIDAY ISLAND, Ten: In 198 1, set on a sunny island (although actually filmed in Melbourne with spray tan on the goosebumps). There was romance, bathing costumes and John Blackman in a special guest appearance. PUNISHMENT, Ten: This dismal effort from 1981 is remembered 'cos Mel Gibson was in the pilot episode, as a criminal. Starred Brian Wenzel as a warder and Barry "Neighbours theme" Crocker as the prison governor. WATERLOO STATION: Banal series about police cadets and their pimply little problems.

It was cancelled after two months, in 1983. skill, its visual style is definitely different to the rest of the genre. The official publicity term is Mark Wakeham, one of the two directors of photography, is the person largely responsible for "the Initially reluctant to join the project, Wakeham signed up after assurances that it wasn't going to be the same old dross. 1 F1 IS inspiration for the photo-U graphic style is European, A low-budget, art house films such as Betty Blue where small crews crank out a lot of screen time under difficult conditions. Unlike conventional soap opera which is shot into boxy, one-dimensional sets with multiple cameras, Wakeham has taken the single camera approach used in feature film production.

With this system, the camera can be on the set with the actors, in among the action, following them around through doors and into other rooms. But it shouldn't be confused with the rough, cinema verite-style of Phoenix and Janus. Pacific Drive is not shot like a documentary. The cameras are on tracks and tripods, just didn't RICHMOND HILL, Ten: An $8 million police soap that ran for 92 episodes. The cast included those soap stalwarts Paula Duncan, Maggie Kirkpatrick, Ross Higgins and Gwen Plumb.

CHANCES, Nine: Chances, a program title that has simply become syno-mymous with bottoms in Australia's televocab. Who could forget Shaz-za's Bar, Bogey Lo's den, the $1 million yacht and Alex's love nest? Some people wept when Chances was zapped in 1992. ECHO POINT, Ten: Yanked off air last year after four months, Echo Point was Ten's much touted effort to TOE SOAPS that wash break into the teen soap bonanza. The suburban soap tried to save itself by featuring other serial graduates as special guests. It didn't work.

PACIFIC BEACH, Nine: Nine's sun, surf and tan series from 1993 that auditioned for models and cast them as actors and then featured Olivia Newton-John as the star of its 100th episode. It didn't work either. Jane Freeman Commercial Reality will return in mid-January. ARCADE, Ten: A lavish ($1 million) soap, penned by Johnny Whyle of Number 96 fame. It's gossipy shopping centre themes bored the audience in bags, or was that just Lorrae Desmond playing Magda, the Zsa Zsa Gabor vamp dry-cleaning lady? TAURUS RISING, Nine: Dallas Down Under, 1981, a wannabe glamourous, soap that centred on the dueling between two building families.

Starring Diane Craig, Maurie Fields, Andrew Clarke, a bunch of Rolls-Royce, private jets and a lot of champagne. It was a Grundy's $4.5 million disaster. SMH The Guide, January 1-7, 1996.