Steven Orsbourn
Steven Orsbourn attended Christchurch Boys and then Christ’s College — he played in the 1st XV and did interschool debating — then in 1986 began three years as a trainee apprentice at TVNZ. Next came the NPPA news video course at Oklahoma University, which involved training in shooting, editing and structuring video: "you learnt to craft and produce yourself".
After returning downunder, Orsbourn was a staff member on the day that new channel TV3 first went to air. He spent five years on TV3's sports team, shooting for award-winning primetime magazine show Mobil Sport, and Short Sportz, fronted by future Amazing Race host Phil Keoghan (the two later worked on Keoghan's No Opportunity Wasted).
In the mid 90s Orsbourn left TV3 to freelance, adding a swag of shooting and field directing credits to his kit bag. They included documentary, and factual reality, plus cooking, travel and more sports — he covered 10 Hong Kong rugby sevens tournaments, and three years of Black Caps cricket tours.
Orsbourn did three seasons as cinematographer on late 90s travel show, Destination Planet Earth. The concept saw Kiwi presenters exploring a foreign city. Orsbourn was twice nominated for New Zealand TV Awards for Best Camera, for episodes shot in India and Amsterdam.
Other shows Orsbourn framed through his lens included award-winning series Captain’s Log (retracing Cook’s journeys to Aotearoa), Give it a Whirl (Kiwi music history), and Park Rangers (tracking Department of Conservation rangers). For Tua Man - Destiny in My Hands, he went into training camp with boxer David Tua for three months, before Tua's world title fight with Lennox Lewis. Orsbourn's camerawork was nominated for another NZ TV Camera Award.
On many of these shows he worked with director Mark Everton, who remembers Orsbourn as his "first choice" director of photography; "an immensely capable professional and an invaluable team player".
Around the turn of the century, Orsbourn began producing his own projects, sometimes taking on directing responsibilities as well. Under the moniker Oxygen Television, he continued to freelance for TVNZ and TV3, as well as international clients (eg as a field director on the Moto GP motorcycle race, for the BBC).
Orsbourn was regularly embedded with sports teams like the All Blacks and Black Caps, which required negotiating often delicate relationships between players, managers, agents, and fans. He became a go-to producer for rugby-related content, namely five Steinlager-sponsored rugby documentaries: The Test – 100 Years of All Black Rugby (which won a 2003 Qantas Media Award for Best TV Sports Programme, and sold impressively on DVD); The Mighty Pride (chronicling clashes between the Lions and the All Blacks, up to the 2005 Lions tour of NZ); The Bledisloe ... Two Nations One Cup; A Political Game (NZ and South Africa's rugby relationship); and Khaki All Blacks (rugby and war), which was nominated in its category at the 2006 Banff World Television Awards.
He also directed international co-production Revealing Gallipoli (2005) which examined the 1915 Gallipoli campaign through the eyes of multiple nationalities, and Jungle Rain (2006) about use of Agent Orange on Kiwi soldiers during the Vietnam War.
As platforms began diversifying from broadcast to digital, Orsbourn began producing multimedia content for news organisations Fairfax and Stuff. In 2007 he joined the award-winning NZ Herald online — where he was Head of Video, responsible for all online news and spot video content. At the Herald he designed shooting studios, and launched a 'breaking news' video team that covered major events — like the Christchurch earthquakes the second David Bain trial and two Rugby World Cups — and produced lifestyle and entertainment content.
At the 2016 Canon Media Awards, two Orsbourn-produced stories were finalists: one on Teina Pora's thoughts at being wrongfully imprisoned, and another on All Black coach Steve Hansen’s selection challenges before the 2017 World Cup.
The diversity of Orsbourn's credits made him something of a screen Swiss Army Knife, and in 2016 he pulled out another tool: Head of Content for Ogilvy and Mather's social media content creation agency, Culture.
In 2019 he was headhunted to join Sky Sport News, where he produced a daily live breakfast show for Sky Sport and Prime. The show was a casualty of Covid-19 lockdown. Orsbourn got busy filming and producing content for Sky Sports, including for the long-running The Crowd Goes Wild.
Steven Orsbourn died on 11 July 2023.
Profile updated on 17 July 2023
Sources include
Steven Orsbourn
Steven Orsbourn website (broken link). Accessed 17 July 2023
Culture website. Accessed 17 July 2023