On Wonder World
Andrew Lesnie's first job out of film school was on Wonder World. He finished at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in 1979 and walked straight onto Simon Townsend's show as a cameraman, shooting stories all over the country for an audience of children.
He always spoke warmly about what that gave him. The show handed a young cameraman the chance to work almost every day, with little restriction, across an enormous range of subjects and conditions, the kind of grounding you cannot buy. He spent somewhere between eighteen months and two years on Wonder World before moving on, depending on whose account you take.
After Wonder World
From there he built one of the great careers in Australian cinematography. He shot the mini-series Bodyline, then feature after feature, and in 1995 he photographed the talking-pig film Babe, which brought him to the attention of the director Peter Jackson.
Their work together produced The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Lesnie won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for The Fellowship of the Ring. He went on to shoot King Kong, I Am Legend, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and the whole Hobbit trilogy, where he was one of the first cinematographers to shoot a major film at forty-eight frames a second. His last film was Russell Crowe's The Water Diviner, released only weeks before he died in 2015, aged 59.