On location: Rescue Special Ops
The Nine Network’s new drama brings big stunts back to the small screen. Laine Lister joined the special ops in Sydney.
Can we use your building? Cool, because we’re going to throw three people off the top, set it on fire, and say it might be unsafe,” laughs producer and writer Sarah Smith.
It’s one of many hair-raising stunts that she and her production partner Julie McGauran pitched to managers of potential sites to film their gritty new drama Rescue Special Ops (RSO).
It takes a little convincing, she admits, adding that for most, their business’s reputation for OH&S outweighed a free plug.
“There have been quite a few challenges, the biggest being locations.
“Having said that, all the location people we’ve worked with have been amazing,” she told Encore during a recent set visit.
Filmed in and around Sydney, the 13-part drama series delves into the lives of the men and women of Rescue Special Operations; experienced paramedics trained to diffuse peril by calling on their abseiling, surfing and even 4WD driving skills. The rescue missions are coordinated from the unit’s headquarters – a custom-built set in an industrial area of Naremburn on Sydney’s North Shore.
The action, however, takes place outdoors with episodes as far reaching as the Blue Mountains, Hunter Valley and national parks to Coogee, Kings Cross and Malabar in Sydney’s south, to name a few.
“Julie and I both knew we wanted to use Sydney, even though it’s not just about the city, it does have a stark beauty and colour,” Smith says.
Unlike the de-saturated look of other programs, RSO is made vibrant with the primary colours found in the natural landscapes, including the blue of the ocean and the green of the forest. It has a noticeably blue and red palette too, reflecting the colours of rescue operations.
Shot using two Sony 900 R cameras, with a third camera introduced for bigger stunt scenes as well as a steady cam, director of photography Russell Bacon says the result is glossy and glamorous in a “rescuey” way.
“I like to keep the camera moving. Everything is generally on tracks or on a rig and I just keep the background swinging around to keep it interesting and alive,” he says.
It is this style of filming that gives the drama a feeling of maximized reality with a documentary edge and excitement, says director Ian Barry (episodes 5, 6, 11 and 12).
Given the amount of planning and set design required for each episode, however, it’s clear that RSO is far from a documentary. The second episode, for example, was filmed at a water park in Penrith using a set built to imitate a stormwater drain. In episode 7, a ferris wheel was brought in to create a fun park, while in episode 11 (part of which was being filmed during Encore’s visit) a series of disasters occur when a bride escapes in a hot air balloon on the eve of her wedding.
“For this episode [11] we’ve got to do a pretty tricky action sequence at the head of a rogue balloon… balloons won’t respond to any mechanical control and even the operator can’t tell you where it’s going to go or come down,” Barry says.
“A groom tries to arrest the ascent of the balloon and grabs onto the rope and he falls, so we’ve got to rig up a crane device so we can manoeuvre the basket and get a camera overhead,” he explains.
DOING IT BIG
In terms of set design and effects, RSO marks a departure from skimpier television budgets of the past, according to set designer Tim Ferrier.
“The vision for the show was pretty big with special effects, stunts and things that television in this country has shied away from a little bit. Ostensibly that’s because of the cost factor.
“What’s good about this show is that they’ve wanted to embrace that and make the show very big,” he says.
The series was financed by the NSW Film and Television Office, Nine, Screen Australia, Southern Star Entertainment and private investment.
More than simply stunts and elaborate sets however, the producers set out to establish memorable characters.
“Anyone can do big explosions and big stunts; we have done those on every other show that we’ve worked on. It’s about bringing the characters to life and making them real,” says McGauran.
The real rescuers of this country were inspiration for the project. Southern Star commissioned research to study ambulance officers and the special operations training they received. It was their lives, more than simply their rescue stories, that appealed to Smith and McGauran.
With this in mind, the two recognised a gap in a market saturated with police and hospital dramas, both from domestic and international producers.
McGauran says: “From the beginning I wasn’t just interested in ‘how can we get this guy out from the rubble’ in a [Thredbo landslide survivor] Stuart Diver way or in terms of the Beaconsfield miners story per se, there’s so much procedure and yes, there’s the story, but what’s really going on?
“We didn’t want to be too earnest or serious. They’re doing a serious job and take it seriously, but to cope with that they use humour,” she adds.
Smith agrees adding that what struck her was a brotherly affinity shared by the real rescuers; a closeness they wanted to bring to the series.
“We thought if we had brothers [as central characters] we could introduce the laconic Aussie humour. Brothers can stir the shit out of each other and get away with it”.
Recreating that kind of chemistry on screen was crucial to the success of the show and the producers spent a long period of time in casting to “get the right fit of all different people”, she says.
Les Hill (Underbelly) was selected early in development to star as lead rescuer Dean Gallagher, but finding an actor to fill the role of Dean’s brother Chase – played by Andrew Lees (The Pacific) and a suitable romantic lead took a little longer. The rest of the cast includes familiar faces Libby Tanner (All Saints), Peter Phelps (Stingers), Daniel Amalm (Underbelly), Gigi Edgley (The Secret Life of Us) and Katherine Hicks (Heartbreak High). While Gary Sweet (Police Rescue), Tim McCunn (Underbelly, A Tale of Two Cities), Wil Traval (All Saints) and Simmone Jade Mackinnon (McLeod’s Daughters) make guest appearances throughout the series.
Appointing directors (Peter Andrikidis, Ian Barry, Geoff Bennett and Garth Maxwell) on the other hand, was a simpler task, McGauran admits.
“Our directors are very established and we went that way for a reason, this is big shoot and it wouldn’t have worked without directors of their calibre,” she says.
A good, but small team of writers (Liz Doran, Chris Hawkshaw, Michaeley O’Brien, David Ogilvy, John Ridley, Jeff Truman and Dave Warner) was equally important for this character-driven drama.
“With a drama show you’re always looking for a story engine, which is why people tend to do cops, lawyers and doctors as they do bring in stories every week, whereas if you do a character drama it’s a bit harder. So we thought this will give us our stories, but actually it’s quite hard to plot, we have a big rescue, but we create a story within that,” says Smith.
And while the writers concoct new and exciting ways to endanger their characters in each self-contained episode, the series succeeds in its mission to entertain.
McGauran puts it like this: “We just wanted something positive and it sounds daggy, but we need some heroes and realism as opposed to 24 or shoot ‘em up cops – we’re not killing people every week”. ■
