An ABC serialised drama is providing consistent work for creatives in WA’s television industry.
An ABC serialised drama is providing consistent work for creatives in WA’s television industry.
Warren Clarke expected he’d have to move from his native Western Australia in order to achieve his goal of a career in television.
After he had studied screenwriting in Sydney in 2012, he assumed that was where his professional future lay, given most of the television opportunities were in the eastern states.
But the take-up of his serialised drama The Heights has not only kept Mr Clarke busy, but also fostered opportunities for younger creatives.
The television series, originally pitched by Mr Clarke and his colleague Que Minh Luu, was approved for a second season in August and began filming at ABC studios in Perth at the end of last month.
It tells the story of inner-city Australia using a social housing block and the surrounding gentrified neighbourhood as its backdrop.
“We wanted to create a vehicle that would effectively be able to reach into all those lives and tell a representative story of Australia,” Mr Clarke told Business News.
The show was designed for 30 half-hour episodes and the possibility for multiple seasons, to provide opportunities for TV professionals in WA.
“It’s a style of TV that hasn’t been done in a while in this country,” Mr Clarke said.
“We sort of sit in between a true serialised soap like Home and Away or Neighbours and a short-form series, which is traditionally between six and 10 hours.”
Serial dramas have been the access point for people into the industry for many years, Mr Clarke said.
“It’s very hard if you are a writer, for example, to get a job on a one-hour drama because there are just no scripts,” he said.
“This [The Heights] enables us to welcome people in, get new voices, get new perspectives and lets the show embrace the new way of TV and the new voices and the new generation of TV makers, which is really great for us.
“It gives our show an energy, gives our crew a really great vibe as well and a real ambition to do anything that’s thrown at them.”
As someone who studied film in WA and felt like he potentially had to leave to further his career, Mr Clarke said it would be nice for graduates to know there was a television show being shot year-on-year in Perth.
“I think that enables us, the experienced crew members in WA, to pass on those skills to the next generation,” he said.
Thirty per cent of the cast got their first credit on the first season of The Heights and four new writers will receive their first long-form drama credit on the second season.
Screenwest chief executive Willie Rowe said long-form dramas helped sustain and support the film and TV industries in WA.
“We are looking to ensure creatives, both in front of the camera and behind the camera, have got employment on a regular and consistent basis, and shows like The Heights do that,” Mr Rowe told Business News.
“Also you’ll find having people here who are regularly employed is an attraction for people coming to make movies in WA because they know that they can get professional local crews who are very highly regarded.”
Mr Clarke said they focused on using WA crewmembers and bringing home WA professionals who had moved to the east coast.
The first season of The Heights employed: 178 crew, 156 of whom were from WA; provided 84 speaking roles that were mostly filled by people from WA; and used 300 local extras.
“A show like this, being such a large-volume show, equates to about 23 weeks of employment for a lot of people through pre-production and production, which if you work in the television industry, particularly in Perth, that’s a really big engagement,” Mr Clarke said.
“It allows you to be employed for a big chunk of your year and in an industry that has a lot of uncertainty, that’s a big factor.”
Mr Clarke told Business News he believed the show benefited from having a crew that was eager to prove good TV could be made in WA.
The broader industry also offered financial reward for the state.
Screenwest’s Mr Rowe said that, in the 2018-19 year, Screenwest invested $5.1 million, which generated about $89 million in production spend.
“It’s quite a considerable investment return and of that, about $40 million was spent in WA,” he said.
Mr Clarke said the whole state stood to benefit from bringing work here, given the globalised nature of the industry and the millions of dollars involved.
“Everybody wins when TV gets made in WA, it is a real good news story.”