A film nearly ten years in the making, shot across Scotland and Canada, has come to completion in Sydney.
Kyle Portbury’s period drama The Hopeful, about a young family aboard a steamship sailing across the Atlantic Ocean in 1874, finished post-production in the city last month with the assistance of The Post Lounge, Mighty Sound, and Spectrum Films.
It comes after a production process that began in 2013 with a six-part online series that Portbury was commissioned to direct in Upper Canada Village on the Canadian side of the St. Lawrence River about the history of Adventism, written by Aaron Hartzler.
Much of what wasn’t used in the final cut went on to form the foundation of The Hopeful, with Portbury reaching an agreement for the footage about three years ago, before suffering through a COVID delay, and eventually receiving the assistance of an investor in August last year.
After a three-hour pickup shoot on board the world’s last seagoing passenger-carrying paddle steamer in Glasgow, the film was taken to Sydney, upon which colourist Brett Manson worked alongside Portbury at The Post Lounge to shape the look of the film. Mighty Sound’s Matt Perrott then supervised the sound edit ahead of the final mix at Spectrum Film Sound Mix Theatre with Glenn Butler, who is the company’s re-recording mixer and senior sound engineer.
Portbury, who resides at Bonnells Bay in Lake Macquarie, told IF the talent pool in Sydney meant that it was favoured over other destinations such as London and Canada, both of which were similar financially.
“We couldn’t have access to the level of collaborators that we were able to access in Sydney anywhere else,” he said.
“The guys at Mighty Sound, The Post Lounge, and Spectrum Films have all just worked on Hollywood features for the past two years, so you are getting a level of collaborator that has been working with top Hollywood.
“You can’t get that going into the LA market, you can’t get it very easily in London, and it doesn’t really exist in Canada because all their post tends to come back down into the US anyway.
“So we were just very fortunate.”
The finished version of The Hopeful stars Gregory Wilson as a widower that delights the restless minds of his two children while aboard a steamship with a tale of a young woman (Tommie Amber-Pirie) who speaks up in a man’s world, a farmer (Bill Lake) with a prophecy about the end of the world, and a retired sea captain (Timothy Paul Coderre) who anticipates the new world ahead.
Portbury is producing alongside Bin Li and Martin Thorne, with Kevin Christenson and Vyacheslav Demyan executive producing alongside Derek Morris of Hope Studios USA.
The film features music by Australian composer Blake Robinson and UK composer Michael Price, as well as original songs by singer-songwriter Jonas Myrin.
Portbury is in the midst of taking meetings in the US regarding a North American release, having already locked in an unnamed distributor for Australia and New Zealand. He hopes to release the film in the third quarter of this year.