For instance? Well, let’s start at the turn of the century. Filming for some well known business awards we turned up at the headquarters of the now infamous One Tel to interview its directors about the phenomenal success of the company’s business model… at the very time it went so spectacularly belly up. Needless to say, we didn’t get the interview and not another word about One Tel was heard from our clients who discontinued their annual celebrations of stratospheric corporate growth shortly thereafter.

One of the more intriguing interviews we did actually film was with an Australian, recently released from jail in the United States, who, as a follower of David Koresh, lived through the siege at Mount Carmel, near Waco, Texas up to and including the day that fire consumed the Branch Davidian ranch, killing 76 men, women and children. By the time he returned to Melbourne, our interviewee had served a twelve-year sentence and considering its severity and the extraordinary events that led up to it, he seemed almost eerily calm and detached from it all.

Of course when you’re filming an interview as rare as that, you want it totally free of distraction, which is why we hired a sound stage to do it. On the other hand, there are some projects where a bit of background sound can definitely enhance the atmosphere. So, for example, when you’re filming a well-known sex therapist discussing a range of practices not normally recommended by missionaries, the thwack of leather, vigorously applied to bare buttocks – and the accompanying gasps of appreciation – are a positively welcome intrusion from next door. Shooting this pilot program for a proposed series dubbed ‘Sexational’ produced many other diverting tales, most of which, unfortunately, our natural sense of propriety prevents us from alluding to here.