The Safe House Press Kit

Premieres Tuesday 20th January 2009 at 10.55pm on SBS 

This film from award-winning animator Lee Whitmore 

is based on a true story from her childhood in 1950s 

Australia - her brush with the Cold War spy drama 

known as the Petrov Affair. 

“A luminescent recreation of a pivotal moment 

in Australian history as experienced through a 

child’s eyes and ears.” Keith Gallasch. Realtime. 

Winner - Yoram Gross Animation Award, Sydney Film Festival Dendy Awards 

Winner - Best Animation, IF Inside Film Awards 

Winner - Best Animation, ATOM (Australian Teachers of Media) Awards

Key Credits 

Animator/Writer/Director: LEE WHITMORE 

Producer: DENISE HASLEM 

Featuring the voices of: 

NONI HAZLEHURST as adult Lee Whitmore 

TARA MORICE as Val Whitmore 

GENNARDI DUBINSKI as Mr Petrov 

INGE ROMANTSOVA as Mrs Petrov 

Music: MICK CONWAY & JEREMY COOK 

Screen Australia Executive Producer: ANNA GRIEVE 

SBS Commissioning Editor: MIRANDA DEAR 

Duration: 26 minutes 

The Safe House website 

The Safe House is a Screen Australia National Interest Program. Produced in association with 

SBS Independent. 

Synopses 

Ashley de Silva | SBS Communications Specialist 

t: +61 2 9430 3792 | f: +61 2 9430 3052 | e: ashley.desilva@sbs.com.au 

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One line 

This film from award-winning animator Lee Whitmore is based on a true story from her childhood 

in 1950s Australia - her brush with the Cold War spy drama known as the Petrov Affair. 

One paragraph 

It’s the summer of 1954 and seven-year-old Lee Whitmore and her friends are drifting through the 

holidays, exploring their quiet suburban neighbourhood where nothing ever seems to happen... 

until the day mysterious strangers move in with the old lady next door. No one explains the odd 

comings and goings, the big black cars, the men in suits and hats, the overheard snippets of 

conversation, but that doesn’t stop the children from imagining. The Safe House is a half-hour 

animation based on a true story - a young girl’s innocent perspective of one of the most talked 

about moments in Australia’s history - the real-life spy drama known as the Petrov Affair. 

One page 

It’s the summer of 1954 and seven-year-old Lee Whitmore and her friends are drifting through the 

holidays, exploring their quiet suburban neighbourhood where nothing ever seems to happen... 

until the day mysterious strangers move in with the old lady next door. 

No one explains the odd comings and goings, the big black cars, the men in suits and hats, the 

overheard snippets of conversation. But that doesn’t stop the children from imagining. 

Lee makes sense of what she can, aided by half-understood scraps of radio news and blurry 

photographs on the front pages of the newspaper. 

Only many years later did she learn that the strangers were Russian defectors in hiding from the 

KGB and in fear for their lives. 

The Safe House is a half-hour animation based on a true story—a young girl’s perspective of one 

of the most talked about moments in Australia’s history—the real-life spy drama known as the 

Petrov Affair. 

The film effortlessly evokes memories of childhood and a sense of a time passed as awardwinning 

animator Lee Whitmore highlights the fragility of the safe little world she lived in—as 

innocent of the larger world as Australia itself seemed half a century ago. 



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About the Petrov Affair 

In 1954 the key political issue to dominate Australian politics was the defection of Soviet agents 

Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov. In the Cold War climate of the 1950s, this emotionally charged event 

became highly politicised and led to the dramatic circumstances of the ALP split in 1955. 

[Source: Old Parliament House School Education Programs brochure] 

Animator/Writer/Director’s statement by Lee Whitmore: 

The Safe House began as a true story too good not to use, somehow. The house next to my 

childhood home in Sydney was used as the safe house for Evdokia and Vladimir Petrov after they 

defected to the West in 1954. 

The title The Safe House refers not only to the house the Petrovs were kept in, but to all the 

houses in our street - the “Safe Street” - and to Australia itself 50 years ago: the Safe Country, a 

cosy backwater where nothing ever happened. 

In telling the story I have made the street and my childhood the foreground and the Petrov Affair 

the background. 

One of the themes in my film is how children understand the larger world - how much they are 

told, what they are not told, and what sense, if any, they make of what they see and hear. There 

are many “secrets” in the film - the Petrovs trade in secret information, the parents keep secrets 

by simply not explaining difficult things, and the children themselves create secret worlds. 

About the making of the film - Q&A with animator/writer/director 

Lee Whitmore 

1 When did you come up with the story for The Safe House 

Some time after making On a Full Moon I started thinking about The Safe House, but I 

couldn’t work out how to tell the story with enough detail when as a child surely I knew 

very little. It was the idea of using the radio and the newspaper that gave me a way through 

the dilemma. Ironically – as it is made for television - my story is set just before television 

came to Australia. I liked playing with the idea of how information reached us then - how 

we knew about anything outside the safety of the home. Hence the postman, the visitors, 

the telephone, the newspaper and the radio are all important characters in The Safe 

House. All but one of the radio broadcasts had to be recreated since the radio stations 

did not keep copies of the originals. I was really lucky that one broadcast, where Gary 

O’Callaghan describes the chaos at Sydney Airport as two KGB heavies were dragging 

Evdokia Petrov onto the plane to take her back to Moscow, was kept for posterity. 

2 How much later in your life did you fully understand what had been going on next door 

Most of my information comes from things my mother told me, although exactly when 

she told me I don’t remember. Obviously it was a lot later than when the film is set that I 

put all the pieces together, about the Cold War and the Red Scare and the connection the 



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Petrovs, the strangers next door, had to all of this. Balancing the story of the Petrovs with 

my own angle on it was the hardest thing about writing the script. Rather than revealing 

any hot, new information to inform history, what the film offers is a kind of folklore about 

how I and the other people in our street remember the incident. 

3 How do you think the Petrov incident being so close to home affected you 

I think it aroused my curiosity about things outside our home and our street, and caused 

me to sense perhaps for the first time that all was not well in the world outside. 

4 What did your parents think of the Petrovs 

My parents are no longer alive so I couldn’t ask them when I was writing the film. I don’t 

remember any conversations between them regarding the Petrovs. I do know that, like 

most people at the time, they were against communist states. But they were very levelheaded 

people who just dealt with the situation on a personal basis, in the sense of “what 

can we do to help friends and neighbours like Mrs Warby and Ted and Leo”. 

5 What kind of work did your father do In the film he seems like a very inventive man, 

making a pool out of chairs and a tarpaulin for the kids and so on. 

My dad was a freelance illustrator and commercial artist. He worked at home in his studio 

at the top of our house. He was inventive and he could do anything with his hands - 

making the swimming pool out of canvas was very typical of him. But it was also typical 

of the times. People were handy at making things and did their own home repairs, like the 

scene in the film where Ted is up a ladder repairing the guttering. I think people didn’t have 

so much then. There wasn’t so much to buy and people were more resourceful. 

6 Do you still keep in contact with the kids who used to live across the road, or anybody 

else from that time 

Yes, I’m still in touch with my brother Kent of course, and two of the neighbourhood kids, 

Jill and Geoffrey Davis, and I did make contact with Ted Warby while researching the film. 

But I don’t expect the film to renew many old friendships. Most of the characters in the film 

are dead now of course. I just hope the ones who remain are happy with my interpretation. 

MEMORY 

7 What role does memory play in your life 

I think I must have a good visual memory. I prefer drawing from memory than from life. 

Somehow time has a way of filtering out the irrelevant and intensifying the things that 

matter. Without memory none of us really function - it is as important as breathing in the 

sense of living a full life. I find the process of drawing aids and prompts my memory in the 

most extraordinary ways, so animating my films has always been a process of discovery. 

Although I storyboard my films and plan them very carefully there is always room - as I am 

animating - to add or change things as ideas come into my head while I’m drawing. 



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As a child I was a quite passive little girl, and I suppose I was a keen observer. That’s what 

I’m saying in the opening scene, when I’m standing at the gate watching the street. 

8 You have children of your own. As your own children were growing up, did you watch to 

see their reactions to the world more closely than other mothers 

With my own children, yes, you pass on your own way of seeing I think. Having children is 

like having your childhood over again. So they have provided me with all sorts of childhood 

detail that I haven’t remembered but which has enriched my films enormously. 

9 Do you remember everything that’s in The Safe House Did you do any research 

In making The Safe House I used several techniques to prompt my memories. I made a 

detailed model of our street and the immediate neighbourhood, which involved going back 

there and taking photos and making drawings. I also made a lot of drawings of our old 

home, very big drawings in pencil based on old photographs, of every conceivable angle, 

rather like the sketch perspectives architects make. I researched Mrs Warby’s house - the 

one next door to ours in the film - which is the oldest house in the area and has quite a 

long history of its own. And I did a lot of research on period detail: the look of cars and 

trains, the details of newspaper headlines and postmen’s uniforms, the furniture and the 

phones and the clothes of the time. I used to be a production designer and I always 

enjoyed this part of the job, so it came easily. I read up about the Russian defectors and 

looked at old newsreel footage about them too. I had never done this much research for 

my other films, but I felt I had to get the period right for this one. 

STYLE 

10 You have combined traditional painting techniques with digital technology in The Safe 

House. How did you do the animation itself 

The technique I used is a traditional form of animation, working directly under the camera 

to create movement. I worked on glass using oil paints and olive oil, a medium that kept 

the paint from drying out and so remaining wet and movable. In each scene I chose a base 

or ground colour, a piece of coloured paper I placed under the glass. This provided each 

scene with a particular mood or flavour. For example, under the fire scene at the end I used 

a burgundy paper to give intensity, and under the scene where the black cars arrive in the 

street I used a mid grey to suggest a slightly foreboding mood. 

Each image was created on the glass first by drawing it in a chinagraph black pencil and 

then painting in the image. This would often take quite a while, given the images are rich in 

background detail. What then followed was a process of animating the moving elements 

in a shot. This meant rubbing out and painting in the new position and re-painting the 

background that had now been exposed. This process involved the use of many rags, 

cotton buds and brushes, and - depending on what had to be moved in each frame - would 

also take quite a long time. On a good day I would do about 40 image changes, but on a 

slow day I would only manage one or two. This happened in the first scene, when the Carter 

family arrives in the street. There was so much to move from one moment to the next I often 

only managed one or two paintings a day. At this point I thought I was in real trouble doing it 

this way, but I kept going and it seemed to get faster. 



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Previously I have used film to record images, but this time I chose to try digital technology. 

It was the combination of the traditional painting technique and the new technology that 

really determined the look and style of the animation. What recording it digitally into a 

computer on Capture files meant was I could immediately see what it looked like. I could 

run it backwards and forwards immediately and so constantly check for timing, movement 

and continuity. This process allowed me to do much more complex and detailed 

animation than would have been possible using film technology. 

11 What made you choose that particular style 

Several things - one was a pressure to be modern. Film Australia were keen to make films 

using the latest methods. And the second reason was 35mm rostrum cameras were fast 

disappearing, and I knew I would need one dedicated to my use for at least two years. And 

the third reason was the portability and affordability of the new technology. This meant I 

could set it up and have it permanently in my studio. 

TECHNIQUE 

12 Physically, how did you go about setting it up in your studio 

Setting up the system for shooting in my studio involved a steep learning curve. Working 

digitally was completely new to me. When I started I couldn’t even send an e-mail and 

I’m still not very good at it. This is where my friend David Davidson, the post production 

supervisor, came into the picture. He explained the process to me and discussed what I 

would need - what kind of computer (a Mac GQ), what kind of screen - and how it would 

then proceed to making the delivery items, and to film if funding can be found. With more 

expert advice I bought myself a Canon EOS D10 digital stills camera with a 50mm macro 

lens, and set it up on an old polaroid copy stand which I got from the Sydney University 

Medical Centre. The stand has a two metre high column with arms on each side each 

holding two 75w tungsten lights. The lights were important in that they had to be low 

wattage, otherwise I would be working under too much heat. On each set of lights, and 

on the camera itself, I had to put a polaroid filter. This was to reduce any flare from the 

glass and to stop the wet oil paint catching the light and thus creating a distracting visual 

result. After much fiddling and experimenting I finally got the camera, lights, working table, 

computer screen and mouse all in just the right position for comfortable work over an eight 

hour period each day. I added an air conditioner just to make production possible over the 

hottest months, which it did, but it also meant my studio was now the coolest room in the 

house and it was hard keeping the family out! 

The images were recorded by the camera and immediately transferred through the 

Remote Capture software and automatically stored on the hard drive Capture files. From 

the Capture files I had to crop the image in Photoshop to 16x9 for television. The images, 

scenes, could then be made into QuickTime movies using Final Cut Pro. These were then 

used for the final edit on AVID. After that it got even more complex and Denise Haslem, 

with David Davidson’s help, took it through post production. I don’t know anyone who has 

a setup quite like mine in Sydney at the moment, so the whole production was a process 

of finding out as I went along. 



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13 Which came first, the images or the soundtrack 

The first step in creating this kind of narrative animation is developing a detailed storyboard 

from the script. After that we made the main dialogue track. Our casting agent, Celia 

Matthews, helped us find the actors to do all the voices -seven kids and eleven adults. We 

recorded the voices over a series of sessions, and then Bronwyn Murphy edited a voice 

track that we sent to Peter Jennings to do the sound charts, breaking down the sound into 

frames. I worked from these charts as well as the storyboard as I was animating under 

the camera. This is how animation that uses dialogue is normally done because the charts 

provide the timing for the lip sync work. 

THE PROJECT 

14 How does this film sit alongside your films to date 

This film is an extension of the work I have done in the past both thematically and 

technically. All my films are autobiographical and they all involve drawing or painting. They 

are all about childhood in some way. On a Full Moon is the most intensely personal of my 

films, about the birth of my first child. The Safe House is the last in this series of films about 

my childhood, and is a departure in a way because it has a political background, the Cold 

War. It represents a step for me into wanting to tell stories looking outwards rather than 

back into childhood. 

15 How did you and the producer, Denise Haslem, come to work together 

Denise and I go back a long way. We met through friends at Sydney University in the 

seventies and worked together on fringe theatre productions for several years. When she 

went into film I would do titles and graphics for films she was making. We know one another 

really well and it has been great to work on a project as intensely as this once again. 

Denise was also the editor on this production. In these two roles she brought an incredible 

range of knowledge and understanding of what I was trying to do. Her commitment was 

pivotal to this project being realised as I had dreamed it would be. 

16 How many images are there in the film 

I have no idea! Obviously thousands and thousands. If I counted them I could never have 

gone through with making the film! I think Denise Haslem, the producer, estimated there 

were about 50,000. But really it’s not important. 

17 How long did it take 

About a year to write it and raise the money, then after Film Australia became involved, 

another year researching, storyboarding, casting, recording and editing the voice track, 

and setting up the camera and computer system, which was a story in itself. Then two 

years on the drawing board to make it, six days a week. I think I took a week off over 

Christmas. Then another three months to fine cut it and see it through the lab. So about 

four years from end to end, although I’d started thinking about it a long time before that. 



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18 Did you imagine the film would be of this scale when you began 

Yes. This is my fourth animated film. They have all taken a lot of concentration, time and 

energy, but this one of course being the longest was a pretty terrifying prospect. There 

were times when I didn’t think I was going to finish it. 

19 Are you a patient person 

I remember my mother throwing up her hands at my lack of patience! Now I think I’ve 

learnt to be patient with my film projects and my children. I owe a lot of my ability to stick 

with things and be patient to my husband Mark Stiles. He just has this way of encouraging 

the effort and the outcome so I keep going. 

20 What kind of formal art training have you had 

My dad trained me after I left school for several years at home. After that I taught myself 

most things as I went along. It seems incredible to young people now, but when I was 

young you could get by without certificates or degrees. 

21 What kind of art practice do you engage in for pleasure 

Well there’s not much time left over when you make films like this one and have two children! 

CONCLUSION 

22 What do you hope audiences will get from the film 

I hope audiences find the film an interesting window into a period of our history that has 

gone forever. 1954 really was a turning point for Australia in so many ways. I also hope 

people enjoy the animation and the characters, and seeing animation used to tell stories 

about our lives and our past. I’ve always been interested in extending the range of subjects 

animation is used to express. 

23 What comes next 

I’m not sure what comes next, but I’d like to make one more film. 



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About the filmmakers 

Animator/Writer/Director – Lee Whitmore 

Lee Whitmore is an independent Australian animator. She began her career 

working as a graphic artist and illustrator of children’s books. In 1974 she 

studied stage design at the National Institute of Dramatic Art and so began 

an involvement in the dramatic arts and film. As production designer, Lee 

designed several short films and two Australian feature films, Stir (1979) 

directed by Stephen Wallace and The Winter Of Our Dreams (1980) directed 

by John Duigan. She was nominated for Australian Film Institute awards for 

her work on both these films. 

In 1984 Lee made her first animation, Ned Wethered (11 mins). It won 

several local awards and was invited to 22 film festivals around the world. 

Her second film, On a Full Moon (17 mins) was completed in 1997 and was a prizewinner at the 

Annecy and Hiroshima film festivals. Ada (7 mins) was made for SBS Television in 2002. 

Lee has also contributed animated sequences for the feature films Breathing Under Water (1990) and 

Looking For Alibrandi (2000).and to the children’s TV series Lift Off (1991) and Play School (2001). 

Producer/Editor– Denise Haslem ASE 

Denise Haslem is a producer and editor with more than 20 years’ experience 

in the film and television industry. Denise produced and edited the award 

winning Mabo–Life of an Island Man and has also produced DOC–A Portrait 

of Herbert Vere Evatt, A Calcutta Christmas, co-produced Risky Business and 

Steel City, and was consultant producer of Ordinary People. In 2002, Denise 

was producer, director and editor of Film Australia’s Outback DVD. 

Denise’s editing credits include many award-winning programs. In 2002 she 

spent 8 months in Yirrkala, in northeast Arnhem Land, producing and editing 

Lonely Boy Richard, which was nominated for best documentary at the 2004 

AFI Awards. 

In 2004 she produced and edited the second documentary shot during that time in Arnhem 

Land, The Pilot’s Funeral, and in 2005 completed a third project Ceremony The Djungguwan of 

Northeast Arnhem Land DVD which includes a feature length documentary Djungguwan Speaking 

to the Future and six mini documentaries about Yolngu ceremony. All these projects are Film 

Australia productions. 

Between 1998 and 1999 Denise was the President of the Australian Screen Editors (ASE), the 

guild devoted to protecting, promoting and improving the role of the editor. In 2002 she was a 

recipient of an inaugural ASE accreditation. 



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The Safe House Press Kit

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