- September 1996 -

  • Like the previous shoots, the majority of this shoot has never been published, except a few that appeared in low resolution on our photo CD #1, and many of them were severely chopped up. So, again, for good and bad, here they are complete.

    As you will see, once again we got our hands on a broken camera. It was a very disappointing and bitter situation, as you can imagine. To make matters worse, this shoot, which we hated anyway, broken camera aside, was the last 35mm film we ever had developed. Not because we were tired of broken, old, used cameras, but because several developers told us not to come back. That our content was something they just couldn't stomach any longer. This wouldn't be our first brush with censorship though, years later we would have trouble getting our film reproduced. 'Land of the Free'? Ha! But we had learned long ago that America was anything but 'free' in any definition of the word.

    Angry, but not defeated, we decided to go forward the only way we could. Which was by using an 8mm camcorder to film photo shoots, basically posing for stills. It was a shitty, bad situation. From September of 1996 till nearly the end of 1997 we were forced to use this method. Well, I guess the silver-lining would be it gave us lots of hours of early Mourning the Ancient video footage, which is neat to look back on now.

    Digital cameras were a godsend, but they were still a year or more away. And although they would give us the ability to bypass the almighty censors, the early quality was dismal.

  • Reflections: This was a strange night of shoots for a few reasons. A lot of things were about to change, although we didn't know it yet. As mentioned above, it would be our last 35mm shoot. It would also be the last time we used the strange skull mask, which ironically looked pretty good in grainy, dark and blurry photos, but in clear shots it never looked right to us. This shoot also included a vague 'fuck-you' to Christianity, courtesy of our pagan masked... thing. A small protest for over nine million people being burned at the stake, I think. But, nonetheless, we thought it looked pretty stupid.

    Welcome to our end, and our new beginning!

    [Outtakes]

    [Outtake - this is the book we would later use in the opening of our film]

    [8mm video stills]

    *All images are strictly copyrighted. They may not be displayed via internet or printed form in any manner without our written permission, nor are they to be altered in any form whatsoever. Violators shall be vigorously prosecuted by international law.