My last post was all about how I asked my models to look stoned and brain dead.
That, as it turned out, is a surprisingly difficult thing to pull off.
So herewith a few outtakes from the raw series in which people failed to look like zombies.
Monthly Archives: August 2014
Zombies wear Gap
A series over a year in the making, a while back I realised I’d fallen into the trap many photographers end up in in the early years after they turn pro.
I’d become so het up about things like correct framing, exposure, focus, lighting and all the other technical titbits that I was starting to lose sight of the madness that got me into this in the first place; of shooting things at random just to see what happened.
So I recruited some improbably willing models (improbable given that my pitch was: “I want to make you look ill”) who gamely stepped in front of the lens for what I like to call my raw series.
Which was all about making people look slightly brain dead and/or stoned.
Big thank yous go to Andrew, Angela, Antonio, Emma, Luke and Martin for being bonkers on cue.
New website
Well, it’s only taken four months (what can I say, these things take time…), but I’m pleased to announce I have a brand new website at www.scottrylander.com.
The old one’s off to get turned into glue.
Death to the Finborough
If there’s one character who pervades every scene of Sommer 14 — A Dance of Death it is, as the title suggests, Death (note for the uninitiated: it’s not a ballet — a dance of death / Totentanz / danse macabre is a mediaeval literary genre centred around the fact we all die…).
German playwright Rolf Hochhuth’s exploration of the events that led to the First World War gives us Death as a wild-eyed and innocent teenager who finds himself on the battlefields paying for the vanity of the European elite.
For the poster and advertising shoot we wanted to create imagery that conveyed three things: that Death was a German soldier, that Death was Death, and that Death was young and innocent and not who you’d expect.
Director Chris Loscher and designer Mike Lees solved the first problem by procuring a full-on German World War I outfit, complete with spiky helmet.
For making Death look like Death, it was for brilliant makeup artist Siwan Hill to work her magic and create a skull that left just enough human face behind to let us know there’s a boy back there.
And to make Death look young and innocent, we went to the font of all persons young and innocent but still old enough that you don’t need 18 child minders and security — people taking their GCSEs — for our (fantastically patient, fantastically willing and generally fantastic) model, whom I shall not name to avoid school gate ribbing.
Sommer 14 — A Dance of Death is currently playing at the Finborough Theatre in Earl’s Court.
Heart Reaper
Production shots from “Grim” — a wonderfully fun new musical now playing at the Charing Cross Theatre.
The show tells the tale of the unlikely love affair between high school kids Grim (hobbies include swinging a scythe and collecting cloaks in every shade of black) and Cupid.
…To the front
And we’re back for the production photos of the European premiere of the Ahrens and Flaherty musical Dessa Rose — now open at Trafalgar Studios.
It’s really rather good.
From the back…
Ironically, about the last place you’d expect to take rehearsal shots would be on the stage of an actual theatre, least of all one as capacious as the Charing Cross.
So I got up to quite a bit of mischief doing everything I never normally get to do for the rehearsal photos of Dessa Rose, now open at Trafalgar Studios.
Those keen (and, if internet chatter’s to be believed, there are many of you) for a peek at the production images should check back in an hour.
