Behind The Scenes: The Harvest

Photo shoots: all fun and games until somebody accidentally releases a demon.

But what else would you expect when you’re shooting a campaign as creepy as this?

As you might have seen by now with the epic lookbook, The Harvest tells the story of a group of women living on a wild rural property, where mysterious rituals and spooky happenings take place alongside all the day-to-day farm work. Our content producer Eden had to do some serious scouting to find a location that had all the features we wanted to capture that vibe: old barns, dry long grass and creepy cornfields. She ended up finding the perfect place with Tommerups Dairy Farm, a working farm around 1.5 hours drive from Brisbane that checked all the boxes.

It was actually a super sweet, serene place (complete with baby calves!) – not necessarily the first place you would think of when planning a goth campaign shoot!

As usual, the BM photo shoot team included stylist and content producer Eden, art director Palmina, photographer Phi and assistant Claire. The amazing Alana (@alanamevissen) was back to do hair and makeup, and Monica and Charli were cast as our creepy farm-dwellers. 

On arrival, it was straight into the farm house for hair and makeup. The brief was a little different to most of our previous goth shoots – instead of dark, heavy makeup, we wanted a really fresh, natural look for both models, more ethereal, maybe even a little haunted.

Flawless.

The farm house, where we took all of our internal shots, was super interesting to poke around in. There was a lot of history told through all the old photos hanging on the walls, and so many cool little features.

But we didn’t have much time to explore it all – we had photos to take!

We wanted to give the impression that there was a whole group of people living on this farm, so for some shots, it was all hands on deck. In this case, quite literally – this pic features the hands of everyone on the shoot team.

Similarly, Eden and Claire had to step in to some of these shots out in the fields to give the impression of a larger group. Talk about multi talented!

Once we left the farm house, we had to do a lot of traipsing through fields to get all the different shots we wanted. And when you have fields full of cows, you also have fields full of cow pats. We spent most of the day looking at our feet to make sure we didn’t step in any, and Palmina nearly passed out from holding her breath all day. Yep, fashion ain’t always glamorous…

We did get to see some pretty cool things though, like this abandoned old truck, completely overgrown with grass. What happened to the owner? Perhaps they were another victim of The Harvest…

Being a working farm, there was a lot of actual farm activity taking place in the background of our shoot. The old shed where we took these shots was in the process of being dismantled right then and there.

See that stick sculpture in Charli’s hand in this shot? It’s called a ‘demon catcher’. Supposedly, if you break it once it’s been created, you release the demon inside. Eden made this one especially for this shot. But right after the pics were taken, Phi stepped on the demon catcher…and broke it. Eep.

For our next shots, we had to get up close and personal with some of the farm’s residents. And you know the old saying about working with animals? Yeah, let’s just say we’ve never worked with models as high maintenance as these chickens.

“Speak to my agent, hooman!”

While Monica was a little wary of her feathered co-stars, Charli was right at home, being a farm gal herself!

See this hay bale Monica is sitting on? It weighs 300kg, and had to be flipped onto its side for us to get this shot. No wonder farmers have muscles.

Finally, it was time to get the shots we were most excited about: in our creepy cornfield. Right from the beginning, we knew these would be the pics that would really set the tone of the campaign.

The thing about cornfields is: they are genuinely spooky. The corn was…whispering to us. They may have more than just ears…

And that was a wrap for The Harvest! We packed up all our things and bundled ourselves into our cars for the long drive home, with the haunting whispers of corn in our ears and a possible demon on the loose. 

Just another day in the life of a BM photo shoot team, really…