A trio of experienced Australian television industry figures are launching a new production company, Lantern Footage. Its aim is to provide a range of independent TV content and help implement the American system of artistic showrunners on the Australian stage.
The announcement was made on Wednesday by noted author and showrunner Sarah Lambert, director Jane Manning and former Foxtel media governor Andrew Lambert. They unveiled the new company at a seminar held during the Display Endlessly conference on Queensland’s Gold Coast.
The company is known to be involved in about a dozen new initiatives, many with a strong female slant, some coming from Manning’s pen, others in partnership preparations. The first ones should be announced in the next two months.
Sarah Lambert says her recent experience producing the Sigourney Weaver-starring miniseries “The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart” for Amazon and Season Five, and her previous work in Europe and the US, motivated her to take an entirely new approach.
“Looking at the scale of projects that were being offered, in terms of writing and showing… amazing things you can do like fashion pieces, better television styles, really exciting things… I wanted to bring those productions back here (to Australia) ). Why weren’t we doing these productions?” She says Selection.
“It felt like it was time to create a company that truly put writer-creators and director-creators at the heart of production. It’s not just about creating these projects here with our production partners, but also about creating a system here where we take the writer-creator all the way to the end of production, really honoring that authorial voice, and being really bold when it comes to imagination. and prescient what we were doing.”
Manning says the startup could make a difference. “Sarah has been an incredible writer and also an incredible showrunner. ‘Flowers’ and ‘Lambs of God,’ they include the cast and the design and the tone and the whole range of skill sets that very few people have. Sarah is the person who can really help embed and develop this model in Australia,” said Manning Selection.
Andrew Lambert says Lantern will act as an independent producer and not with a specific main sponsor for now, and that he hopes to work with the known set of commissioned broadcasters, government agencies and commercial distributors. “We will be investing our personal money and forming partnerships. It is a crucial position that producers play in the industrial ecosystem, especially in incubating new concepts. That’s why we’re not averse to co-productions,” he says.
“Rights retention and acquisitions by streamers are points we will have to deal with, like everyone else. It’s an industrial negotiation. We realize the pitfalls of this situation and are sure we will find a way out,” he adds.
Along with “Flowers”, Sarah Lambert had already achieved acclaim with “The Messenger” for the Australian Broadcasting Company and “Lambs of God” for Foxtel. She was also the creator, author and producer of the hit series “Love Little”, which ran for four seasons on the 9 Network. Before returning to work in Australia in 2006, she worked for 12 years in New York as a partner at production company Babelfish, producing, directing and writing documentaries, children’s television and drama, running its post-production business and servicing markets and funding collections that it was filmed all over the world.
Manning is best known for the “Back to Nature” documentary series. She also received major awards at the Berlin, Locarno and Palm Springs festivals for the narrative short film “Delivery Day”.
Andrew Lambert was a career lawyer based in Sydney and New York before switching to the industrial side of the TV business. In this guise, he headed ABC’s industrial operations. As head of corporate affairs at Foxtel, he negotiated the pay TV group’s core content business and the business aspect of its local content production.
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