Magey Raajje Nethidhanee - The Process Behind the Project

Ever since I first joined the MA Photojournalism & Documentary Photography course in 2021, I had known that I wanted to make a project about my home, the Maldives. After a trip earlier in the year for my cousin’s wedding, I started putting together ideas of different stories that I could tell for my Final Major Project, and one subject that kept coming back up again and again was the climate emergency. I just wasn’t sure how to tackle the subject!

Over the 6 weeks that I spent in the Maldives working on my project, I ended up travelling to several local islands and resorts - photographing a HUGE variety, from documenting 16 hours on a masdhoni (tuna fishing boat), to capturing James Blunt and his wife for the Blue Marine Foundation! I ended up taking thousands and thousands of photographs, mostly focusing on using my Nikon D780 DSLR. However, I have always used a Practika AF-2 point-and-shoot 35mm camera for my personal photos with family and friends, and one of my tutors, Jermaine, had pointed out the personal aspect of using this camera. With this in mind, I had also taken an entire bag of Kodak Gold rolls with me, and used up 11 rolls - 10 of which developed perfectly.

Upon returning to university tutorials, I realised that in a lot of my digital photos, I had been approaching the topic at a distance, whereas the film photographs were deeply personal. Climate emergency wasn’t just a journalism topic, it was also part of my own story, so I decided to use the film photos for my project.

So, the process began with scanning all of my film! I ended up with over 300 photos, from which I made a smaller selection of around 90 images - mostly photographs with strong meaning to them such as of family, friends and general images that felt like home to me. I then began to think about how I wanted to use these photos - I could have just used them as a standalone photography series, but didn’t feel that it would get across the climate emergency aspect the way that I wanted it to. I wanted people to really understand the fear, the grief, the impending loss of our country, culture and community.

With a lot of very helpful guidance from my tutors Jenny and Morag, I decided that I would film myself damaging the prints, exposing them to the main effects of climate change being experienced in the Maldives - heat, bleaching, and water (sea levels rising and more extreme storms). However, this meant testing different photographic papers to find out how to best get these effects.

One thing that I have always said about UAL is how underrated our incredible technicians are! With the help of Wendy, Cora, Daniel, and Nathaniel from the Photography Technicians, I landed upon the majority of photographs being printed as Digital C-Type Chromira prints, which was very effective for burning and being treated with bleach. I then had help from Jess in the Printmaking Workshop in finding a suitable printing material that would melt when exposed to fire, testing the burning ability with Hannah from the 3D workshop of three different types before settling on a ribbon-type silk paper.

Jess and her colleagues Izzy and Rosemary then assisted me in figuring out how to do the water exposure. I ordered dissolvable sheets of paper (a type of rice paper for artwork use!) from Amazon, and we ended up having to print those images in the UV printer, to avoid any of it dissolving in a regular printer! This kind of printing was an incredibly slow process. What took me even longer, though, was trimming every single print with a ruler and scalpel by hand (except for the fabric-type paper, which Scott from Print Finishing at UAL was more than kind enough to trim for me on the big old machines!)

Before I started filming though, it was time for the second round of testing! I had several test prints of the two more experimental materials - the rice paper and the fabric type paper. As I didn’t know what the effects would be on those once printed (as I was unsure if the inks used would affect the way the materials would react), I had to do some second trials with those two. The fabric paper burned the same way, but I discovered, interestingly enough, that the UV ink would hold the darkest parts of the rice paper prints together (as the areas with the most ink), as the ink itself was not water soluble, being UV cured.

The next step was to started destroying my prints and filming it all! I decided to use my Nikon D780 mounted on a tripod as the main camera, with my OM Systems TG-7 as the secondary camera for the close up shots, due to it being a fantastic camera for macro and microscopic shots. I rented lights and tripods from the university, bought some cheap black baking trays from Morrisons, and several bottles of household bleach. Rosemary, the workshops assistant manager, made sure to equip me with PPE masks and gloves, after we sat down together and wrote down a mini risk assessment/health & safety list.

Lugging all of the equipment from the campus in Elephant & Castle to my home in East Sussex was one of the most exhausting parts of the whole project! I was, however, very lucky in terms of location for the filming, as I was housesitting for family friends (thank you, Sarah and Tim!) and the room that I was using had huge French doors right next to the table I was sat up on - great for ventilation! The oven was also close enough for me to use its’ fans to disperse smoke and fumes.

The process of destroying the prints and filming it all took about 3-4 days. As I needed to have total control over the lighting, I did it all at nighttime, using only the lighting I had borrowed as the primary light source. This meant several late nights of going to bed at 3am, so a very tiring week it was indeed. I was also limited by the bleached photos needing time to dry - I didn’t have enough surfaces to lay out all of them out at once, so could only do a certain number of them per night.

Once all the prints were done, it was time to record my voiceover, using a Rhode mic from our family friend, Tim. This again took a few days, as at this point, I was finding the project was bringing up a lot of intense emotions for me, and I was feeling very drained, and very small. I spoke to family and friends for inspiration, and asked them to send me clips and videos of noises and scenes from back home, to see what it inspired for me. I also got my father, my Maldivian parent, to record a couple of voiceovers of his own about how he felt about the climate emergency in the Maldives.

Then it was time to comb through several hours worth of clips! By time I had gone through every single clip and deleted anything unusable and trimmed all the others down, I was still left with almost exactly 2 hours of video… With a suggested video length of no more than five minutes from our exhibition curator, Viv.

I decided to do the sound first, cutting my voiceover to be smooth (erasing all ‘ums', ‘ahs’ and other bloopers and fluffs!), then looking at other sounds I wanted to include. I put in one of the recordings a friend from the Maldives had sent, of a koveli (Asian koel) bird in the mornings - my favourite sound. I felt that I still needed more, so I found a boduberu (traditional Maldivian drums) song as a backing track, a cover of Kalaa Fenumun by Ekathi Boduberu group. I was very lucky to then have my sound checked, mixed, and produced properly (as I had recorded my voiceover wrong and it was only coming out of one ear on headphones!) by the brilliant Charlie Andrew. Once the sound was done, it was a lot easier to then place in the clips that I wanted, and adjust their speed to the sound - and it all came together.

The final part of the process was going over the film again and again, just fine-tuning the edit to make sure the flow of the timings was perfect, adding in subtitles, credits, etc and then exporting it properly. It was then time for the showcase set-up - read about the installation process here, and the Private View night here.

The project was started around mid-April, and completed towards the end of November. I do intend to continue this project, and push into developing the film further in the future. Check out the current ‘Magey Raajje Nethidhanee’ project here. If you have any other questions about the process, pop them in the comments!