Shooting Zombies for a Living: The Eclectic World of the Production Photographer

There are very few professions where you get to shoot zombies for a living, but production photography is one of them. If you’ve ever wondered what production photographers do and whether you might like to try it for yourself, then read on because this article was written just for you.

Take a poll of photographers about the genres of photography they follow, and chances are that production photography won’t even make the list. Everybody knows that TV shows, movies, and commercials aren’t made without the essential contribution of the cameraman or cinematographer, whose job is to capture the moving footage. What is less widely known, however, is that most production crews also include a still photographer whose job is to navigate the often crowded and busy set, capturing still images that will be used in a variety of ways once production has wrapped.

In commercials, TV, and movies, production photography stills are most often used for promotional purposes. Production stills are used to create the movie posters that you see at the theater or the ads for new TV and movie releases that appear in your online feed. In the case of commercials, the footage is usually only one component of an advertising campaign, and will often be accompanied by online and print ads that will be created using the production stills.

Another common use for production stills is to document the production itself — to capture the creative process of putting together a movie or TV series for posterity. Production stills often get used in articles, books and even in subsequent productions, documenting the production work itself, along with the many serious and sometimes light-hearted, behind-the-scenes moments that occur with the actors and crew as they are working together on the project.

It’s interesting that some of the most iconic images that we associate with popular TV series and movies, are actually production stills and not images captured from the footage, or scenes that even appear in the final cut at all. Production photography, just like other areas of photography, is a real art, and there are practitioners who create some stunning work. Take a look, for example, at the incredible portfolio of Ursula Coyote, who has done the production photography for some of the most popular and seminal TV shows of recent years, such as "Breaking Bad".

When I was presented with the opportunity to do some production photography for a low budget, independent horror movie that was being shot in New England, I jumped at the chance. Our whole family are huge movie fans and horror is definitely one of our genres of choice!

Bloodyback is a wonderful, genre-bending short movie that could best be described as a period drama with zombies. Blending history with horror, the movie is set in the heart of the French and Indian War of the 1750s and 1760s that raged along the Eastern seaboard from Virginia to Newfoundland. A deadly zombie plague threatens the (living) population of North America, forcing both sides of the war into a collaborative struggle to survive.

Most of the movie’s action was shot on a beautiful, 300-year-old farm in Rhode Island. As well as being an amazing backdrop for the movie itself, this was a fantastic location for photography. Even the New England weather cooperated to create a wonderfully spooky atmosphere.

Before shooting started, however, there was an enormous amount of preparation required, not only to get the actors into their 18th-century attire but also to create the movie’s terrifying zombie protagonists. My first job was to document the incredible special effects makeup transformation of actors from living to undead. The series of images below shows some of the key steps in the process, from the use of contact lenses to create the ghostly, dead eyes of the zombies, to the incredibly skilled and painstaking application of latex and paint on the actors’ faces to create the zombies’ wounds and decomposing flesh. Because the living protagonists of the movie are embroiled in a war, the makeup artists were also called upon to create a wide variety of cuts, scratches, bruises, and even gunshot wounds.

In addition to the essential role of the makeup artist, it takes a lot of different skills and areas of expertise to make a movie. Behind the scenes, you also have cinematographers, sound specialists, special effects people, assistant directors and so on. Because Bloodyback was both a period drama and a war movie of sorts, the production props featured an impressive array of swords, axes, and antique muskets, all of which required the presence of a professional armorer. Some recent and unfortunate incidents involving weapons on a movie set, only serve to highlight how important it is to have somebody who knows what they’re doing when it comes to the use of firearms in movie productions, even when they are ostensibly being used with blank rounds.

As a production photographer, you obviously cannot get very close to the action while the cameras are rolling, so it is during rehearsals and between takes, when the actors are on set in full costume and makeup, that most of your work gets done. In a movie like Bloodyback, which has a lot of action, a great deal of the time between takes on set is spent choreographing and rehearsing the action scenes — to get them perfect for when the cameras are rolling, but also to ensure that they are done safely, without anybody getting hurt.

This was great for me since it gave me plenty of opportunity to photograph the action up close when the cameras were not rolling. For this reason, many of the dramatic action shots I captured were not scenes that appeared in the final cut. I also had the opportunity between takes, to pose the actors in costume, and shoot some background images that would convey the atmosphere and arc of the movie’s narrative. Many of these “between the takes” photographs that I’m including in the gallery below, were the images that ended up being used for the promotion of the movie.

In the end, Bloodyback did pretty well for a short, low-budget, independent horror movie — scooping up a slew of awards at the various film festivals where it was screened to overwhelmingly enthusiastic audiences. Despite my total lack of acting experience, I even got to be in a few of the movie's scenes myself — appearing first as a British soldier calling for medical attention for a fallen comrade and later as a zombie in which my 15 seconds of fame was getting shot in the face by the lead character as he carried a wounded, young girl to the safety of a boat from which they could flee the zombie hoards. As an unexpected bonus of this, I can’t tell you how excited our two boys were when they saw their undead dad getting shot in the face in the final cut!

Whether you're in the cast or the crew, everybody who works on a movie set must adapt to the intermittent stop-start rhythm of film production — sudden and intense periods of activity around each take, punctuated by long preparation periods for the next one. Being a production photographer is no different and often involves a great deal of sitting around, waiting for stuff to happen - but when it finally does, you sometimes get to photograph incredible things that you would simply never encounter in most other genres of photography.

So if anyone calls you and says, “We need you to come and shoot some zombies for us, " I would jump at the chance.