29/08/14
Interview with Laura Jean Healey
Laura Jean Healey is an artist-filmmaker who works
with holographic film to produce haunting and powerful pieces, where the
presence of the actor is strongly felt in the room with the audience. The
Siren (2012), shot
underwater in one sequence, is perhaps the most striking of all of her works to
date.
Anna McNay: We met at the
beginning of the year when your film, The Siren (2012),
was being exhibited in the Winter Pride Art Exhibition. I then came to
experience it to its full effect at the Musion Das Hologram studios. How did
you come to be working in this way? What led you to Musion?
Laura Jean Healey: I originally contacted Musion
late 2008. I had an idea about creating an installation, using life-like
projections that would only exist within the plane of a large – floor to
ceiling – mirror. A friend recommended looking into the Victorian theatre
trick, Pepper’s Ghost. At the time, Musion was offering a free course introducing
students to their digital reworking of Pepper’s Ghost and allowing them to
experiment with their EX3 camera to create small holographic art projects. During
the course, I became friends with the course leader (and now art director), Oliver
Gingrich. It was Oliver who introduced my work to the directors of the company.
I then got another film job and went to work as a
camera trainee on the feature film Gulliver’s
Travels, where I got to work extensively with the Panavision Genesis, the
camera that Musion favour for high profile projects. I had kept in touch with
Oliver and was asked back to assist on a music shoot. Will-I-Am and Cheryl Cole
had just released their single, 3 Words, and were supposed to be performing at a German music awards
ceremony. Unfortunately, Will-I-Am was going to be touring with the Black Eyed
Peas when the event was due to take place, so we filmed him performing his half
of the duet and then he was projected on to the stage, next to Cole, who performed
live at the event. The shoot went well and I was asked to work on several
international projects, including the holographic film installation – in which
a Ballerina turns into a crystal swan and then explodes into butterflies – for
the Yota after show party for the premiere of Mikhailovsky’s Swan Lake
at the London Coliseum; filming Portuguese music artists for the holographic
stage at the Optimus Alive Festival 2010; consulting on the very first
holographic opera, Telesio, for the Italian composer Franco Battiato; and
assisting on the Burberry Body installation, directed by Mario Testino,
at London Fashion Week 2011.
Since then, I have been working on my own projects
and funding my practice by working in the film industry as a camera technician.