It’s the people you remember. When wrap gets called, and everybody starts to head home, friendships often remain. Without wanting to romanticise an often overly romanticised industry, it’s true that many of us get drawn to this kind of work because of the variety of people we get to meet.
The intense situations film crews are often thrown into together makes quickly getting to know one another an essential job requirement. Photographers are observers of this. Disappearing into the great machine of production to document its cogs at work is one of the responsibilities of unit publicity photography. Reviewing the behind-the-scenes images from past projects I noticed two distinct sides to life on set.
Number 1. Moments of concentration and quiet. Faces concentrated on the monitor or the scene before them, attentive to the smallest details, still and silent, in reverence to work taking place in front and behind the camera.
Number 2. Moments of candid laughter and joy, images that may say something of the bond of a crew, actors or creative team.
Both types of image when seen together say something about the relationship between stress or concentration and friendship. Looking through pictures from a single project it is clear that moments of focus and light relief often occur in quick succession. Working on a production in any role can be both intensely hard work and profoundly rewarding.
Most rewarding of all is being able to observe and document the interactions that lead to the creation of something tangible. Something an audience can watch and that may move them.
Here are a handful of images from a variety of productions. I hope that they capture the unique personality of each production and give glimpses into the more intimate moments of life on set.
