Bright Young Thing

A professional photographer at age 12, Bay local Rose McMahon has been forging her own creative path ever since. Now 18, her first TVNZ series has just been released.

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Rose McMahon was not what you’d call a typical tween.

“I think I’d always played around on my mum’s camera, but I really got into photography when I was about 11,” she says. “I started shooting events when I was 12, and I was 13 when I shot my first wedding. So yeah, that was kind of crazy…”

Rose says people would often ask her, “How can you be 13 and be a professional photographer?” Her response was, and still is, simply, “Well, you could be 7 and be a photographer, if you know how to do it — it doesn’t really matter how old you are.”

“I remember there was one wedding where this guest grabbed me and moved me out of the way so she could take a photo on her iPad, and I was like, ‘I’m actually the photographer’. I think it’s funny now but at the time it did affect me — a lot of people thought I was someone’s daughter taking photos, just a kid playing around.”

But even as a 12-year-old, Rose was all business. “I had to do all my GST and accounts and stuff,” she says. “My mum used to do accounting so that was very helpful, she was like, ‘I can teach you all of this’.

“Mum has always taught me — if it’s something you need to do, you need to do it, it’s part of being in business. You can’t just go around and take photos and feel really cool about that, you also have to do all of the annoying stuff, and that includes accounts.”

Rose and her family moved to the Bay of Plenty when she was 6, “to get away from the city and that sort of thing”, purchasing and renovating a “very rundown” 1930s schoolhouse and surrounds (now the Old Forest School venue). She credits her country childhood and homeschooling as key to her burgeoning creativity.

“I grew up in Pongakawa, in the middle of the pine forests — basically the middle of nowhere — which was a beautiful place to grow up,” she says. “It’s just so quiet — the nearest neighbour is a 10-minute drive away.” She says growing up in such a rural spot has definitely influenced her. “It was a very open space, it was very nature-based, it was very carefree in a way.”

Fast forward just a few short years from that precocious 13-year-old wedding snapper, and as you might expect, Rose has continued to excel far beyond her years. She’s 18 now, and has already written and directed multiple short films — not to mention her first TV series In The Rainbow, which was released to TVNZ OnDemand earlier this year.

The first spark of interest in creating moving pictures was back (again) when Rose was 12. “I was the film photographer on a film that was made in the Bay of Plenty — which again was kind of crazy!” she laughs. “It opened my eyes to the ‘behind the scenes’ of cinema. I’ve always been a huge fan of movies, and I’ve always loved to watch the different techniques that people use, but that was my first time actually being on a film set.

“Because I was in the camera department I went, ‘Oh, I want to be a DOP — the director of photography — and then I realised by doing that I’d be working on other people’s creative ideas, and that I actually wanted to be creating my own ideas. “My family laughs at this quite a lot because they’re like, yeah of course you had to be in charge, you couldn’t just sit back and take directions from someone else!

“I was about 13 or 14 when I was like, okay, this is what I want to do now. But then, after not that long I realised not many people wanted to hire a 14 year old, and it was quite a few years before I’d be able to go to film school. So I was like, oh screw it, I’m just going to make some stuff!”

Within two months of that lightbulb moment, Rose had started up her own film production company — Twinkling Bat — and began making her first short film.

The name Twinkling Bat was inspired by a poem from a literary character — the Dormouse in Lewis Carroll’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which is one of Rose’s favourite childhood stories. “The poem and name epitomises an imaginative and unexpected spin on something familiar and traditional,” she explains. “I just thought, why not have a go?!

“I was 15 when I made my first short film, Implications of Imagination, and I look back at it now and think, oh my god, it’s so terrible. But it was just the fact of actually trying it, putting it out there… We even had a screening — it played before The Lion King at Night Owl Cinema.

“It was really cool to just do it. After that, I made some more short films and entered some competitions. I’m someone who very much learns from experimenting and playing around, so that was the best thing for me.

“I’ve directed all of my films, some of them I’ve written, some of them I’ve partially written with other people and then I also do some of the cinematography on them — mainly, I think, because I’m such a visual person, I have such a clear idea of what I want something to look like. “I wrote In The Rainbow along with another writer and my sister who wrote two of the episodes with me.”

Inspired by true stories, In the Rainbow tells coming-of-age stories of LGBTQIA+ youth in New Zealand. “As a storyteller, naturally over the years I’ve been privileged to have people just open up and share their stories and experiences with me,” says Rose. “Issues of discrimination in popular media have never sat right with me and I feel I can be the one to tell these stories.”

“I wanted to make sure the scripts for In The Rainbow were completely authentic and true to the community, so I did a call-out online for people to submit their own experiences for me to write about. I was inundated!”

“My short films are all very different as I was experimenting with different styles to find my personal filmmaking ‘look’. I think, in many elements, I am still playing around to discover this personal flair,” she says. “In The Rainbow is definitely heading in my visual style direction, using things like toned colour palettes, which I love to do.”

“Getting funding for the series was the most surreal thing,” she says. “And it’s so funny, because at the time when I got the funding, I was 17 and I had thought that this would be the year that I would be starting film school — instead I’ve already been making stuff for four years.

“I don’t think I’ll do film school now, while I’m young,” she says. “I love to keep learning and I love being on film sets and I love to have mentor-type people who teach me stuff… and I absolutely love picking up new information. I’m at this point where I’m like, let’s just make films!”

She has a necessary stint living in Auckland, but these days is back in the Bay whenever possible. “I still live here and I love it. It’s so nice as I go about the madness of my life, then I get to come back.”

rosemcmahon.com

Story by Josie Steenhart

Photography by Jess Lowcher

First published in issue 23 of Our Place Magazine.

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