Qweekend: Brisbane business partners Tracey Robertson and Nathan Mayfield have revolutionised television Tracey Robertson, part owner in Hoodlum which specialises in multiplatform projects and has produced digital content for BBC series, Spooks and the US series, Lost. Picture: David Kelly Source: News Limited ONE minute, it's a quiet street down by the Brisbane River, the next, it's Hollywood. It starts with a convoy of white production vans rumbling into the driveway of a grand estate at Fig Tree Pocket. Men with caps on backwards and walkie-talkies on hips swagger about, pointing at things. Trolleys loaded with cameras and recording equipment are rolled down the rambling lawn to the river. Fake tan is rubbed into an actor's legs. On some silent signal, the gang heads to the river's edge, past a sound recordist nestled in a stand of long grass and onto a pontoon. The director, a couple of actors, a handful of cameramen, the makeup artist and others making this rare thing, a Brisbane-based television show, crowd onto the jetty as the brown river rolls by. Standing with them is Tracey Robertson, 46, eagerly watching as the six-part whodunit Secrets &Lies begins filming. Dressed in rock-chic black with a slash of red lipstick, the mother-of-three is happy to be back on a set after facing a decision similar to that made recently by film star Angelina Jolie. The agonising journey from a diagnosis of an early form of breast cancer four years ago to the decision to have a mastectomy had this internationally recognised pioneer of interactive television doubting whether she would ever go back to the business she co-founded. But, now, she's back. "With a vengeance," she says. Good thing, too, because without Robertson and her longtime business and creative partner, Nathan Mayfield, 39, this newfangled television/internet hybrid project set to be unleashed later this year would not be happening. There'd be no heartthrob actor like Martin Henderson, fresh from the US with a host of film credits and a brief dalliance with Demi Moore under his belt. There'd be no Kate Dennis directing the scene with the flair she has brought to ratings success Offspring. Without Robertson and Mayfield and their determination, there'd be no money. "Producer" is just one of the titles they share, but they're also innovators and entrepreneurs, at the international forefront of this 21st century amalgam of traditional filmmaking, internet engagement and smartphones. Risk-takers, too. And winners - twice - of different sectors of the celebrated US television awards, the Emmys. There are two awards from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTAs) on the mantelpiece as well. Tracey Robertson, part owner in Hoodlum, which specialises in multiplatform projects and has produced digital content for BBC series, Spooks and the US series, Lost. Picture: David Kelly Robertson is not from Hollywood, California, though. She's from Springwood, Logan City. Mayfield is from Hervey Bay. They didn't have families of influence or a private-school education. They met when she asked him to rustle up some fake floor tiles. They got talking. Both wanted to make movies. They had next to no idea how. And nothing to lose. THE TILES WERE MEANT TO BE TERRACOTTA but this was a tight-budget TV soap, so they used plywood. A few grey lines of paint to mimic grout and voila! - a row of terracotta tiles as unreal as the storylines of the melodrama that brought Robertson and Mayfield together. Many have panned Pacific Drive, the mid-to-late-1990s show exploiting the materialistic - and murderous - world of privileged poseurs on the Gold Coast. But the duo won't hear a bad word about it. "That show was the best film school you could ever have," says Robertson in the inner-Brisbane boardroom of Hoodlum, the company she set up with Mayfield in 1999. We learned so much. She'd landed at the Gold Coast set in the art department about a year after finishing a Bachelor of Arts (Visual Arts) at the Queensland University of Technology with a major in sculpture. Unlike Mayfield - who went straight from high school into a QUT Bachelor of Business majoring in film and television and joined the set as he was finishing university - Robertson found her way to TV by a circuitous route. School just didn't work for Robertson. There was "never any nice stuff to do." It was the early '80s and girls at Springwood High did home economics and boys did manual arts. Drama classes were cancelled when students misbehaved. Art was about theory and technique, not expression. She zoned out. "I didn't know what I wanted to do but I knew I wanted to do something interesting," says Robertson, who emigrated from Scotland to Springwood when she was nine with her then recently widowed mum, Maureen Keddie. So at 19, after four years working at a bank to save money, Robertson took off, searching. She landed in London. It was like a candy store. She went to art galleries, formed opinions about things she'd never considered and got a job in advertising at one of the then-leading agencies, Yellowhammer. Three years on, she decided to come home and work her way into art school. At QUT, she fell in love with sculpture and, on graduating, opened a studio in Moorooka in Brisbane's south. Some work experience at Nine's art department came up - "The concept of working in television was very glamorous" - which led to unpaid training with a film producer, which led to a paying job on Pacific Drive. Business partners Tracey Robertson and Nathan Mayfield at their Brisbane-based entertainment company. PIC: David Kelly And so it was that Robertson and Mayfield found themselves in the art department of the soap, painting fake terracotta tiles on the set of the Glitter Strip's answer to Melrose Place. Actually, it was just Mayfield doing the painting. Robertson was his boss. They hit it off. Youth and the imagining of endless possibilities were on their side. He had a film he wanted to make, Mayfield told her as the paint flew. So did she. Both had applied for a grant to make their films. Over panels of plywood, they made a deal - if one person received funding and the other didn't, the other would become the producer. It seems odd to make such a deal with someone you've just met until Mayfield explains, laughing: "The chances of those things actually happening were very slim." But it happened. Mayfield's film Jump#123 received funding from a Screen Queensland predecessor, Film Queensland, and Robertson produced it. They borrowed equipment on weekends from Pacific Drive, used stunt people they'd become friendly with and a dream began to take shape. "It always amazes me," says Robertson, "what makes one person decide not to do something and another person to say, 'You know what, I'm just going to make it happen'. Some people's dreams can get squashed by other people. And others just go, 'What do you know?'  Their credo became, "We've got nothing to lose." They would continue making their own films but first tried to learn everything they could. Robertson secured work as a script supervisor and continuity person on Pacific Drive to learn more about on-set etiquette. Later, she'd get an internship in Sydney with producer Glenys Rowe who was working on Feeling Sexy (released in 1999), starring Susie Porter. Mayfield worked in the camera department of the Nadia Tass-directed 1996 feature Mr Reliable, then went back to the Pacific Drive script department. In 1998, they scored a meeting with Seven's then programmer, David Franken, after producing a small community film. "He literally threw us a timeslot," remembers Mayfield. He said, 'There's a slot on Saturday morning, you can have it if you come up with something'. That was a green light to us. We went 'Cool'. Then he stuck his head back in the door and said, 'I've got no money'. But we had a timeslot. That's all we needed. And money. It took them a year, but the persistent duo raised $140,000 to make their TV show after knocking on the door of every relevant government department: federal, state and local. It was 1999, the dotcom era. They were IT novices but were interested in innovation and, on Franken's advice to "do something different, learn about the internet," Robertson and Mayfield decided to make a show about how teenagers were using technology in Robertson's old stomping ground of Logan. Young and engaging - "people just seemed to like us" - they asked Apple and Sony for gear and got it. They convinced the owner of a privately owned internet service provider to let them use his facility free of charge. Then they set about picking the brains of the techies who worked there. The facility had what is colloquially known as a big fat pipe, or broadband, while most of the country was still on dial-up. It was a revelation. Tracey Robertson on the set of , the newly commissioned series for Network Ten. "We were way ahead of things," Robertson says. We really were. We were with a lot of geeky guys who were showing us video streaming and where the world was going to go and we were like, 'Oh, my god'. We had no data restrictions because we had this big fat pipe. I thought, if it is just about the size of the cable that you get your data in, then this is going to change everything. Once people work out how to compress video, everything is going to be possible. It's going to change the way television works. They formed Hoodlum, interviewed hundreds of Logan kids, selected seven as the show's reporters and started making override.com.au, believed to still be the only television show in the world with a URL as its title. It wasn't just a TV show. An override.com.au website (no longer active) was set up where viewers could go to learn more about issues raised in the program. It was a point of difference they clung to. "The TV business is operated by boys who go to lunch in Sydney and Melbourne, and we didn't know anyone," says Robertson. We needed to have something that was different. They would link television or films with the internet. They would value-add to shows by giving fans more details about characters and plotlines on websites, give those web fans tantalising clues and allow them to feel as if they inhabited the world of their favourite characters. With the advent of texting, they'd send updates, even messages from a character or two. They'd create online games that enabled fans to get in on the action. They would embrace technology, bundle it up with old-fashioned ideas such as characterisation and strong storylines, and create something new. IT'S 2008 AND fortunately Robertson isn't further along in her third pregnancy because the shock of it might have brought on labour. Here they are, a couple of mates from Brisbane, Australia, and they've just won the interactivity category of Britain's premier entertainment awards, the BAFTAs, for the web work they did for the slick espionage drama Spooks. Much had happened in Robertson's life since she and Mayfield took override.com.au to Seven, but this was one of the biggest. "It was the best thing," she says, her big eyes widening. It was fantastic. Great. It was a buzz. [Dame] Judi Dench and all these great people were in the audience and it was so cool. A few weeks later, they'd won another BAFTA in the Craft Awards and a year on they were nominated for a Primetime Creative Arts Emmy, this time for their interactive work on the international hit Lost. Keen to share the experience, Robertson and Mayfield shouted the flights of six other staffers to attend the awards in Los Angeles. They won. We all went up onstage and we were the last people to leave. We had a ball," remembers Robertson. You can talk to anyone when you've got an Emmy. By 2010, they had another one, this time in the International Digital Emmy Awards for best digital program with Primeval Evolved, an online game that engaged viewers of the TV series Primeval. Not only did Robertson have some of the world's most coveted awards, she had a family. She'd met her Sydney-based cinematographer husband, Robert Humphreys, in 2001 at the start of work on Fat Cow Motel, the show shot in Harrisville, near Ipswich, that helped spawn the international accolades. "He didn't go back to Sydney," says Robertson sweetly. Instead, they nestled into the inner-western Brisbane suburb of Bardon and welcomed Harry in 2003, then Stella, now 8, and Frankie, 4. Mayfield remains unmarried but is so close to the Robertsons - "we're very interconnected" - he's considered the kids' other dad. The closeness of Robertson and Mayfield's relationship is one of the things that has made Hoodlum work. "We keep checks on each other," Mayfield says. She could be a tyrant and I could be an absolute egomaniac. But one of the qualities he likes most about Robertson is her persistence and resilience. "She just doesn't take no for an answer," he says. When they took override.com.au to Seven, it was well received and won an Asia Pacific IT&T Award. Robertson thought: Surely they'll give us a show to do ourselves. She smiles at her naivety. We quickly realised that's not how TV works. Disappointed and on the dole but convinced they were on to something, the duo knocked on the doors of others they thought might like the concept, including Phillip Luff, then with Austar. Robertson says Luff told them override was not something for his channel but if they came up with a drama, he might come up with some money. They developed Fat Cow Motel, a whodunit for TV that involved the audience through a website, the segments for which were filmed at the same time as the series. Luff came through, providing Hoodlum with $2.5 million for 13 half-hour shows because he "got" their idea and liked their enthusiasm. He's a great friend to this day and he believed in our concept, which was: If you're going to create something, why not create it for all platforms at the same time? By the mid-2000s, the duo managed to convince Kathleen Beedles, the ITV producer of Britain's much-loved soap Emmerdale, to share their vision. At the invitation of ITV executives, they showed her Fat Cow Motel and she asked: Could you recreate that for Emmerdale? You bet. All their skills came together. After their years on Pacific Drive, Robertson and Mayfield knew a soap was a hungry beast that must work as a machine. They knew about A stories and B stories and how to interweave them. The show killed off a character, Tom King, and Hoodlum brought him back online as a ghost. As the show's producers worked their plotlines over 20 weeks, Hoodlum gave out more clues online, hooking a loyal audience of mostly women over 35, some of whom only logged on to the internet to revel in the revolutionary whodunit. By the end of the 20 weeks, Tom King's murderer was revealed. It turned out to be the biggest night Emmerdale had ever had and, what's more, the iconic EastEnders, in an overlapping timeslot, had its second-lowest ratings ever. Work poured in. The makers of Spooks came knocking. Then the US took the bait, with the producers of the hit show Lost recruiting the pair to create online interest for the fourth series. Later, an online campaign for Salt, the movie starring Angelina Jolie, was created. Robertson credits some of their success to being expert networkers, a process honed over years of going to the pinnacle of entertainment industry schmoozing, the festival season in Cannes, France. She's effusive in her praise of Screen Queensland (and its predecessors), which has paid for the duo to attend regularly since 2000, when they had a little show called override in their suitcase. "It's one of the most fantastic things," Robertson says. It's so valuable. There's been a number of people over the years where we've had one-on-one meetings, we share the dream and nothing happens but then years later, they come back. And importantly, after years of saying, "Business plan, what's a business plan?," they got one. The entertainment industry is littered with tales of clever, creative people falling by the wayside because they continued in the feast-or-famine world of independent producing. In the mid-2000s, Hoodlum hooked up with an IT venture capitalist, Rick Anstey, who Mayfield compares with Mr Miyagi from popular film The Karate Kid. He just kept telling us to do stuff and over many years of being around and helpful - and antagonistic and annoying, all those things but most of all a teacher - we delivered all those pieces he wanted. And once we did, he invested in us. Hoodlum's international success has helped it build a solid revenue stream from digital and marketing jobs for paying clients, which now enables Robertson and Mayfield to indulge in home-grown creative work. Hoodlum's healthy balance sheet also helped it weather the storm that was the global financial crisis of late 2008. But Robertson would soon face a bigger battle. THE RESULTS OF THE ROUTINE MAMMOGRAM in early 2009 showed an anomaly but Robertson told herself not to worry. She was 42 when she gave birth to Frankie and had been breastfeeding. I thought, it's got to be just calcification from the milk, right? Robertson says. It turned out to be ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), an early form of breast cancer in which cancerous cells are contained within the milk ducts. As she dealt with the shock, she learned about her options: closely monitor the breast for any changes, or have it removed. "I had a baby who was turning one so I didn't want to muck around," Robertson says. She opted for a mastectomy. I decided I wanted to not be thinking all the time, is it going to get worse? I just wanted it gone and then to get on with my life. I didn't want to die. The emotional strain was greater than the physical assault of operation after operation. She questioned whether she would go back to work as Mayfield battled the fallout from the GFC. I just wanted to stay at home. The emotional stuff really knocked me around. Says Mayfield of his friend's diagnosis: "It was awful. It was horrible. It all happened around the same time: we lost work, Tracey found out. I don't even know how we got through it - I say 'we' because we are so connected at the hip. Slowly, the operations were ticked off, the prognosis looked better and Robertson began feeling healthier and happier, supported "fantastically" by her family, Mayfield and the rest of the Hoodlum gang. Business picked up. "It gives you perspective," Mayfield says. Nothing's ever as bad as then. By the end of 2010, Robertson was back behind the desk with newfound vigour. I made a lot of decisions after that. We bought a house, moved house, moved offices. I thought, let's do it properly. And the last few years have been great. She and Mayfield made another important decision: to get back to where they began and make their own television shows with interactive components. Which is why she's down here by the Brisbane River, watching over the crew filming one of the first scenes of Secrets &Lies. The lady who loves a party has her mojo back and $5.5 million to make Hoodlum's first commercial television free-to-air show (for Network Ten), much of it invested by industry people "who really believe in us." "We want to prove that what we're talking about is a reality," Robertson says about the multi-platform aspects being embedded into the show that will hit the screens later this year. It will be bigger than what we've ever seen here. Anywhere, actually. It'll be good. It will be really good.