The biggest problem, he says, was the traffic. The story starts outside Scots' Church on the corner of Collins and Russell streets in the CBD, ''but you can't stop traffic there in the middle of the day''.

Ballarat would have been a viable substitute, he says but with a four-week shoot there simply wasn't time.

In the end, Errol Street in North Melbourne did much of the grunt work, with half-a-dozen period lamp posts and a couple of faux letter boxes drafted in to hide ''the nasties'' - street furniture, bins, modern letter boxes and the like. Although Stolfo says ''there's still enough Victoriana if you get the right angles'', only about 20 per cent of the movie was shot in its actual location.

Perhaps the biggest challenge was creating the view up Swanston Street from Princes Bridge. For a start, Flinders Street Station as we know it wasn't there in 1886 (it didn't open until 1910). St Paul's Cathedral didn't have its spires (construction started in 1926). And Federation Square - 10 years old this weekend - wasn't even a twinkle in a town planner's eye. So where does the view come from? It's an ingenious mash-up of the real and the fake, or as digital effects producer Scott Zero puts it, of the ''practical'' and the ''digital''.

Shooting a Princes Bridge devoid of traffic was impossible, so the production team looked up river, to the Morrell pedestrian bridge in South Yarra. It was widened in the edit suite, extra horse and carriage traffic added, and birds and flags painted into the background to take the edge off the pixels. ''It's not supposed to steal the show, it's meant to be just an extension of the set,'' Zero says.