In Australia in 2020 with the Covid 19 pandemic there are very few television series that are still able to be filming. I have been very fortunate that the Discovery series Outback Opal Hunters made by Prospero Productions out of Perth has still managed to keep filming.
The decision was made by Discovery Channel to keep filming for as long as we could and to film two series back to back. A huge job of 20 x 1 hour episodes. To enable this to happen four different film crews worked in different states in different parts of the country. We also stayed in each location for the duration of the filming of the series creating a production bubble.
I have spent the past six month working on the series as director and cameraman or shooter producer as it is sometimes called in Australia. We managed to be able to keep filming as we are a small production team of only two people and usually film opal mining teams that only have two to three people in them. Before filming started Prospero Productions put into place very strict Covid filming plans and when we arrived on location in Lightning Ridge in the outback of New South Wales we had to go into a quarantine period of two weeks before we could start filming.
The series has been very challenging to film so many episodes but we are getting some great content and it has been amazing to live in the Outback and meet so many amazing characters.
Outback Opal Hunters filming in Lightning Ridge, NSW