“A vehicle for meaningful change”: Screen experts hit play on Good Apples Pictures

With 20 years of friendship and a desire to bring untold, important stories to our screens, former Hoodlum Entertainment executive Kerrin McNeil and Trade and Investment Queensland deputy chair Kate Hynes have teamed up to establish Good Apples Pictures.

Launched earlier this month, the Brisbane-based production company’s modus operandi is to ‘bring good people together to tell great stories’ and already has two productions in the works - a documentary and a dramedy.

Speaking to Business News Australia, the co-founders said starting Good Apples Pictures was their ‘next chapter’ and the culmination of careers in the entertainment industry.

For McNeil, creating the business meant leaving her role at Hoodlum - another Brisbane-based production company that has worked on TV shows like Vikings, Five Bedrooms and Harrow as well as miniseries In Our Blood and All My Friends Are Racist. Prior to Hoodlum, she worked at the Industry Advisory Board, Queensland where she helped steer the direction of the state’s booming screen sector.

For Hynes, a lawyer by trade but with a UCLA credential in Writing for Television, co-founding the business means she gets to work alongside McNeil again, having collaborated in the past for entertainment organisations including at Hoodlum where she was once head of legal & business affairs.

“Kate and I have had the pleasure of working together over pretty much 20 years or so in different ways and in various capacities, so Good Apples Pictures came from a place of enjoying working as collaborators,” McNeil told Business News Australia.

“We both came to a point in our lives and careers where it just made sense to branch out in this way, and to define what we wanted to do in the next chapter with our skills and work out how we could give back to the sector and work together again.”

Hynes added that launching Good Apples Pictures was a ‘smooth, natural’ process.

“We both left Hoodlum and we missed each other; we really enjoyed working together,” Hynes said.

“We’ve always had a real affinity in terms of the types of stories that we find interesting and the types of screen that we find interesting, as well as our approaches to what we think about screen and the role that it plays more broadly in society in terms of entertainment, but also as a vehicle for meaningful change.

“Seeing someone that’s like you on screen is really powerful.”

The pair will kick Good Apples Pictures off with two productions - a documentary environmental series called My Resilient Home and a dramedy about roller derby named Fat Rollz; two disparate directions in terms of subject matter but both, as Hynes put it, ‘vehicles for change’.

The former will explore how architects and others in the construction space are making buildings in Brisbane more resilient to flooding following the February 2022 extreme rainfall event that saw the Brisbane River peak at 3.85 metres.

“Having lived through and been personally affected by the floods over recent years here, we’ve accessed a community of architects and people working in the resilience space as we build back here in Brisbane and also throughout northern New South Wales which taught us a lot about what was going on and what wasn’t working in that space,” McNeil said.

“It’s about finding a way to talk about what’s a pretty tricky topic - there are ways to talk about it and show some of the positive creative stuff that’s happening.

“We’re pretty excited about being able to showcase some of those techniques and products and tell the stories of people who are rebuilding their homes in completely different ways.”

Fat Rollz meanwhile is a ‘midlife comedy drama series’ which McNeil said was drawing attention to the lives of women at that stage of their lives ‘when there often isn’t a lot of representation’.

“It’s hilarious. It has the opportunity to deal with issues that have been going on for a cross-section of the audience that doesn’t get discussed openly - taking down some of those barriers about our bodies and pressures that women are facing when there are teenage kids and aging parents,” McNeil said.

“The lens on that one is very much about a particular ageing stage for those women, and there’s not a lot around for that age group that’s reflective of their actual experience.”

The launch of Good Apples Pictures comes at an interesting time for the screen sector, with rapid developments in streaming changing the game when it comes to producing entertainment for not just an Australian audience, but a global one too.

Hynes said that despite these challenges, companies like Good Apples Pictures that are producing quality content with ‘great stories’ will succeed.

“It’s actually a really hard time to start a production company,” Hynes said.

“We’re very aware that we’re starting at a time when things are changing, but it’s all about bringing great stories and really good people together that we like to work with and then finding stories that allow those people to be elevated.”

Despite these pressures and smaller budgets for productions, Hynes said that storytelling in Australia would soon have its moment in the sun and would capture a global audience.

“I fundamentally believe that this is an opportunity for us and I have a real core belief in the power of storytelling,” she said.

“Australia is only just beginning to really come into its own in terms of truly local stories that have a fantastic global reach.

“Australia’s been making great content for years but not necessarily its own stories, so there’s a real focus in our company on finding and working with great writers and storytellers and lifting them up.”

McNeil added that she was looking forward to certainty about proposed regulations that would force content platforms to spend a minimum amount on local content.

“We’re looking forward to the middle of the year and hopefully the quotas or regulation coming into place with regards to streamers, and certainly whatever the outcomes more certainty around that will benefit everybody,” she said.

“There’s an incredible depth of talent here, there’s so much production going on.”