A few weeks ago Nick Hyne, Ben comber, Mack James, Vaughan Brookfield and myself were driving to Christchurch to begin shooting Episode 4 for this year’s Diaries Downunder season. We had some amazing weather that resembled more of a summer look which helped when shooting Christchurch. The Sumner beach area was awesome, and the hills above provided us an epic view which clearly illustrated how close Christchurch is to the beach and the mountains. 
Christchurch at Sunset.
When it came to the mountains, Mt Hutt was holding up, even after 19 days of blue bird skies. The park crew at Mount Hutt put in some over time to build us a cool feature, their attention to detail made it all worth while.
Mack James sending it into a huge landing.
Ohau was the next resort on the trip. A week after shooting Mt Hutt and Christchurch we were still enjoying the Tee shirt weather which was great for my pasty white arms but not so much when it came to finding features or making the edit look wintery as it should in Early September.
The view from Ohau.
This is often the problem when trying to make a place look as good as it should be, but not having the desired conditions. We are limited by having to constantly think about what is visible in the background as you would on most film sets.
You have to remember the job of ‘Diaries Downunder’ is to make people want to come to Queenstown/South Island for it’s snowy winter conditions, therefore filming a feature with a huge hill of dirt behind is usually avoided.
In the end the Ohau session was fun. It was good to hit the road again and we got what we needed to include them in the episode.
To finish up we shot a few powder turns at the Remarkables which is a bit higher and holds its snow better on it’s southerly faces. It’s always good to come back to Queenstown wether it be winter or summer.
Nick Hyne after enjoying a fresh line at the Remarkables.
Enjoy episode 4, the road trip.