Working with children

We’re not a child-care facility but we sure get our fair share of working with children.

Supplying to the education sector means our work is either aimed at kids or about kids, and we’ve managed to carry it over to other clients, too.  Particularly in photoshoots, there’s a warmth and heart that children bring that can’t be found in older subjects.

I’ve directed two major photoshoots recently with children as the subjects and there’s an art to working with them.  When they’re comfortable, happy and engaged, it shows and you see their character shine through.  Photoshoots are expensive things (though not as expensive as film shoots) and work to tight timelines.  But do you think kids care? Unless they’re having fun, there are a million other things they’d rather be doing. They get bored, fidgety, tired, distracted, worn out and hyped up.

I’m a dad of three so I came pre-equipped with some basic kid-wrangling skills, but kids are, not surprisingly, all rather different. So I needed to adapt. It used to be that singing a few Wiggles song would do the trick but work with any kid over the age of about four and the skivvy songs just don’t cut it.

Take the junior school students we photographed late last year.  These are lower primary students who I thought would fit well with my young repertoire. So I did a bit of Beiber. The only bit of Beiber I know is the song Baby and the title is the only word of the song I could remember.  So I made up some lyrics (which changed for every class I tried them on) and there was mild amusement.  They knew the song but were more likely to laugh at the old doofus making a fool of himself than by my culturally relevant tunes.  But it worked and they laughed and the shots prove it.  Of course when I asked their favourite artists it wasn’t the age-appropriate Justin but rather Angus and Julia Stone who got the nod.  Of course!  Really…you’re seven years old…

Shooting the series of full-page heroes for the Hastings Deering Caterpillar sustainability report was huge fun.  We’ll profile the job in another blog post but series of kids at work shots were a huge hit within the organisation and beyond, mostly due to the little people in starring roles.

I pulled out a bit of Captain Feathersword for these but found again that the best approach is self-deprecation. Every funny face in my book was pulled out (and yes, as with smiling through a wedding photoshoot, my cheeks hurt for days) but the best move always seemed to be the leap.  I don’t know why the sight of a six-and-a-half-foot man jumping into the air works but it does.  I guess Toyota had that sewn up, with their long-running campaign end screens, and I have borrowed it many times.

But when you’ve been going for hours and the shot still hasn’t gelled, there’s only ever one thing for it.  Sugar.  Lollies, cakes, chocolate…whatever.  If it’s sweet and they can eat it, they will – and for a few more precious minutes (once they’ve stopped chewing) they’re putty in your hands.  Oddly enough their parents never thank us for it though they don’t seem to mind too much either.  I’ll bet they’ve used that trick a thousand times before.

In case it seems I’ve sold the little tackers short, I will say that the greatest joy in working with kids is their lack of ego.  They don’t care how they look, how you’ve portrayed them, whether they look tall or short in the shots.  Most of the time they just want to make you happy, put on their best manners, love the attention and enjoy the praise we heap on them when they just are who they are.

And secretly, I love that they give me the chance to play the fool (and be who I am, too).