MELBOURNE may be renowned as a great Victorian city, but the shooting of ABC telemovie The Mystery of a Hansom Cab was a reminder of just how much the world has changed in the past century and a quarter.
Based on a best-selling novel released in 1886 by Englishman Fergus Hume, the murder mystery is richly descriptive of the city in which the author was then working as a barrister's clerk.
''The information he was giving about Melbourne is pretty spot on,'' says production designer Tel Stolfo, who used the book as the starting point for the look of the 90-minute telemovie.
''I started scouting and photographing locations as per the script, but then the logistics came into it and I realised it was just impossible.''
The biggest problem, he says, was the traffic. The story starts outside Scots' Church on the corner of Collins and Russell streets in the CBD, ''but you can't stop traffic there in the middle of the day''.
Ballarat would have been a viable substitute, he says but with a four-week shoot there simply wasn't time.
In the end, Errol Street in North Melbourne did much of the grunt work, with half-a-dozen period lamp posts and a couple of faux letter boxes drafted in to hide ''the nasties'' - street furniture, bins, modern letter boxes and the like. Although Stolfo says ''there's still enough Victoriana if you get the right angles'', only about 20 per cent of the movie was shot in its actual location.
Perhaps the biggest challenge was creating the view up Swanston Street from Princes Bridge. For a start, Flinders Street Station as we know it wasn't there in 1886 (it didn't open until 1910). St Paul's Cathedral didn't have its spires (construction started in 1926). And Federation Square - 10 years old this weekend - wasn't even a twinkle in a town planner's eye. So where does the view come from? It's an ingenious mash-up of the real and the fake, or as digital effects producer Scott Zero puts it, of the ''practical'' and the ''digital''.
Shooting a Princes Bridge devoid of traffic was impossible, so the production team looked up river, to the Morrell pedestrian bridge in South Yarra. It was widened in the edit suite, extra horse and carriage traffic added, and birds and flags painted into the background to take the edge off the pixels. ''It's not supposed to steal the show, it's meant to be just an extension of the set,'' Zero says.
The city itself was entirely created in a computer. Tolfo's photographic research was the reference point, but in the end the vision on screen is not exactly as the city would have looked.''I like to create an image of the period, a streetscape, that never existed,'' says Tolfo.
This Melbourne wasn't built in a day. It took five. But while this one shot constituted the biggest digital effect of the 70 or so in the telemovie, Zero says it wasn't the most challenging. ''It's the subtle stuff - like taking the white lines out of the road - that you have to be careful with. With period drama, if something starts to look digital you risk breaking apart that world of the 1880s you've worked so hard to create.''
