Dean Cato

After an unsuccessful location scout around Timaru and the Wairarapa for 1986 kidult drama series The Fire-Raiser, Dean Cato was among the production team who decided on Upper Hutt instead. Shooting in those rural locations would have brought up the cost of accommodation, left them a long way from support, and required many special effects shots.

Instead, Cato and his team took an outdoor set — originally built in Whitemans Valley on the edge of Wellington, for TV series Country GP — and reworked it entirely to bring the 1915 setting to life. "We bowled a few buildings over, aged a few, and built some new ones." Alongside the many small details like hitching rails, flowers, and the signage, the team also altered the layout of the township, to fit with the new show's storyline. 

All the while, art director Kate Thurston oversaw the soundstage interiors at the Avalon studios, and ensured everything looked correct on camera. Written by Maurice Gee and directed by Peter Sharp, The Fire-Raiser "needed to have veracity and be credible", as Cato puts it.

The fictional town of Jessop that Cato designed was "Nelson in everything but name", only shrunken in size. This prompted considerable historical research, among them photographs of Nelson capturing advertisement hoardings, the Freeman & Son’s Bakery that Cato’s grandmother’s family had once run, and the suburb of Washington Valley, where he often visited his friends. Both Cato and Gee grew up in Nelson, and they took elements of things they knew and recreated them in their respective art forms.

As for Cato, he grew up in an artistic family. Both his parents often made things for RAF balls and an air force veterans club, including a six-foot-tall papier-mâché buddha. "Nelson's quite a creative little town". Many family friends were potters and painters, and social events often involved crafts. While at school, Cato was keen "to do a mix of science and art and that wasn't allowed, because you couldn't mix those streams", leaving him split between two passions. "Nelson was a great place to grow up, and a fabulous place to leave."

The Fire-Raiser was a success, winning four awards at the 1987 Listener Gofta Awards, including Best Drama Series and Children’s Programme. Dean Cato describes it as "probably the best realised script" of his career. The experience epitomised "one of the beauties of television" — how it can gather together people from many creative practices, including ballet and opera, into a “wide cultural soup”. Nonetheless, this would be the last television project that Cato designed; after Fire-Raiser he resigned, unhappy at what he saw as a lack of management and financial support from TVNZ for drama projects. After TVNZ staffer Norm Adams persuaded him to stay, he did five years in Christchurch as Design Services Manager. 

Cato’s began in television in the Scenic Workshop at Avalon. He was "fortuitous" to work as a set finisher and scenic artist in the newly-opened studios for three years, before moving into the design department. During 14 years in state television, he worked on projects as varied as Buck House, The God Boy, and soap Close to Home. On historical epic The Governor he wound up as an on-location set builder and painter. Cato is thankful for the "opportunities for learning and growth" provided by his mentors, designers Colin Gardiner and Kai Hawkins.

While working on The Governor, Cato became committed to telling stories, especially those that engaged with politics. His first full credit as designer was for teleplay Death of the Land in 1978. The first television drama to involve a Māori scriptwriter, it tackled land grievances and echoed protests of the time. Cato was also involved with the nine-episode adaptation of Bill Pearson’s novel Coal Flat, which was rejected after being researched, scripted, casted, and budgeted over the course of two years. "We’d painted the Blackball Hotel!"” Cato notes. He believes that "political interference by the government" led to the cancellation, which television historian Trisha Dunleavy pins on the furore caused by the costs of The Governor.

Dean Cato also worked as production designer on shows Inside Straight and Roche — two examples of the "back-to-back, fast turnover television" that require a designer to be quick and inventive, able to discover the essence of a story without much planning time. Mostly shot on location, these shows required little in the way of much set design, but "a lot of art direction on the day", leading Cato to build inclusive relationships with lighting and camera crew. On Roche, finding appropriate locations proved difficult because of the size of the show's star vehicle: "a four-tonne, 16-metre-plus R600 Mack truck".

During his time at TVNZ, Cato worked with Janet Williamson to design Yvonne Mackay’s indie production Blackhearted Barney Blackfoot, which mixed live-action and animation, using expressive visuals and lateral camera movement — "akin in hindsight to director Wes Anderson". 

Alongside design work on theatre productions Pigland Prophet and The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin, Cato was art director for 1983 feature film Strata, directed by Geoff Steven and featuring on-location work around Mount Ruapehu and Tauranga. Czech designer and filmmaker Ester Krumbachová was co-writer and costume consultant; she shared stories of the generous resources offered to filmmakers in Czechoslovakia, which left a lasting impression on Cato. He recalls the wealth of creative talent involved, but found the shoot unhappy, and the script lacking. It proved to be "a salutary learning experience", but one he did not regret. 

After resigning from state television after The Fire-Raiser, Dean Cato worked as a design services manager, witnessing from afar "the full commercialisation of television" which had helped cement his choice to leave. During the building of museum Te Papa, Cato teamed up with director/producer Steve La Hood and writer James McLean to create the iconic object theatre installation: Golden Days. This interweaving of narrative and spatial design would come to define Story Inc, the company they established together in 1997.

Story Inc continues to this day, focused on crafting visitor-focused spatial narratives, a field that Cato believes "has an element of a greater societal good". Among their many successful projects across Australasia are the Beating Hearts of Te Arawa for Rotorua Museum, the Museum of Hanoi, and the New Zealand Pavilions for the world expos in Aichi (2005) and Shanghai (2010). The combination of physical space, video and interactive elements is present in many of their design projects.

Another project returned Cato to the orbit of the film industry — The Lord of the Rings Motion Picture Trilogy: The Exhibition, which toured the world between 2003 and 2007. Cato and La Hood's original vision of creating "highly immersive theatrical spaces" and reconstructing filmic environments was scrapped while La Hood and McLean were in Singapore. Back in Wellington, Cato had to rethink the entire project overnight. By prioritising behind-the-scenes ‘making of’ content and arranging the exhibition around character relationships, a new vision was defined.

"We treated it like an archaeology exercise — as if we’ve gone back in time thousands of years to a different earth and we’ve dug up all this stuff." The exhibition was also a way to celebrate the Lord of the Rings production team. Costumes and props were displayed beside new technology such as face scanning, which the public could interact with.

After leaving Story Inc in 2011, Dean Cato did consulting and smaller projects — among them a redesign for the Waitangi Treaty grounds — before becoming "a ski bum" and running a ski lodge on Mount Ruapehu.

Cato was later recast as "an accidental academic”, after being invited to run a design school in Wuhan, then teach at the Detao Academy at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts. Working under Kiwis Kim Jarrett and Tina Hart, Cato joined Yvonne Yip and Greg Piper to develop a new course “heavily influenced by film”: the Bachelor of Themed Environment Design. It combinedg creative storytelling with methodology and organisational thinking; one could argue that the course fulfilled Cato’s boyhood wish to mix art and science together.

Profile written by Danny Bultitude; published on 21 June 2024

Sources include
Dean Cato  
Rachel Barrowman, Maurice Gee: Life and Work (2015. Victoria University Press)
Trisha Dunleavy, Ourselves in Primetime: A History of New Zealand Television Drama (2005. Auckland University Press)
The Fire-Raiser press kit