Photographers at work.

Before I really start this post I would like to clarify that living and working in Enniskillen was fantastic.

Having said that, being trapped in a land devoid of phone signal and a decent internet connection has been crippling in terms of acquiring new information (thankfully the local shops do stock the daily papers), maintaining blogs or electronic correspondences, and any sort of "online presence" (ah, contemporary culture moves too fast for photographers trapped in the sticks).  This pastoral paradise, however, the opportunity to work alongside two very talented photographers: Campbell Mitchell and Neil Davidson.

Campbell and I were working as a standby prop team on the feature film Miss Julie (2014), and Neil was the unit photographer.  The culmination of our efforts can be seen below (photograph by Neil; retouched by Campbell).  Although it has been agreed that this could be our spin-off sassy-country hillbilly-chic album cover (should the world ever need to hear that) we are actually hard at work (trimming trees and fending off nature's barbs).

This is some of what has been going on over the past month or so.

-PM

Nazis stole my Christmas...

[Still from Dead Snow, 2009, dir. Tommy Wirkola]

Well, sort of.

Throughout December I was working on a BBC4 drama, entitled An Innocent Abroad (nothing to do with Dead Snow pictured above), and this wonderful job consumed all of my time.  Working with specific period props and dressing was invaluable experience, as well as tackling onscreen smoking (I have a new appreciation for the standby props team on Mad Men).  The feature is set during WWII and follows P.G. Wodehouse - more information can be viewed here.

[Christmas, on the set of An Innocent Abroad, Belfast, 2012]

I had banked on working on my photography coming up to Christmas, and so this was unexpected.  But a job is a job so it must be done, and it was a fantastic script/period so it was a pleasure to work on. However, as I was working out the logistics to my Offshore project, for the forthcoming O U T | T U O exhibition, and submerging myself nightly in photographic theory and Rathlin research, I managed to mentally juggle both: props by day and photography by night.

The role of 'standby props' involves taking plenty of pictures anyway, so I was never far from a camera (and we happened to be using plenty of vintage cameras too, for our wartime journalists).  My images from the sets of An Innocent Abroad obviously cannot be shown, but I can show other photographs that I took during the filming process.  With another possible group show coming up later in 2013, focusing on the spectacle of filmmaking, I was drawn to photographing what we consider normal on set, or as part of everyday, that isn't - giant balls of light, for example.

There are also images of beard trimmings, fancy coffees in fancy homes, ninja antics, manual car rocking, and flash bulbs. But I'll save those for another time.

-PM