July, featuring the Scissor sisters, king kong, massive snakes and skimpy outfits.

So I hope this instalment is found more entertaining than the last, which I realized after publishing, was quite a painful read!!

So my month in news…
Early July I did a couple of jobs in the same week, the first was a music video for the forthcoming Scissor Sisters single. I had no idea this was what I was about to do, having been told just the location of the studio and what animals to take, which were two Mexican black kingsnakes and two bullsnakes, the latter of which being rather nervous as they’ve only recently joined the collection, it was their first job, and because, well, they’re just that kind of snake. Now the contact name on the sheet was the same as a photographer I’ve worked with before, so I naturally assumed I was about to do a still photography shoot and have quite a laugh, but when I arrived a realized it wasn’t still photography at all, and that I was on the set of a pop promo! I recognised the girl from the band by her unusual tattoo on her shoulder that I’d once seen in a magazine but it wasn’t until they did the first rehearsal I recognised who it was when I heard to style and sound of the song. Another person I recognised was Brian, the director, an American guy whom I’d done the Zutons cockroach video with, so I knew right away we’d have a fun time on the job.

One snake of each species I had starred in a different set up. The first shot was a scene in a warehouse. They were blue screening most of it, which really helped. For those who aren’t sure what blue screen is, it’s a technique used in TV and movies whereby the actors are filmed in front of a blue (or green) screen made of specially coloured paint and then with the magic of computers, live or still backdrops can be put in the place of the blue, allowing for more exotic, or complicated or expensive locations to be recreated realistically. So anyway, there were only a few props such as a hanging window frame, some tea chests and barrels and a couple from the band were tied back to back on a pair of chairs, as if they had been kidnapped. So my black kingsnake had to crawl menacingly across the floor towards them and beneath the chairs where they were sitting. The first one I used (Elvis) really surprised me by not moving at all- I thought he’d shoot off as soon as I put him on the floor. So I subbed him for his slightly smaller son, Freckles (below), who was a star and they got the shot on the third take!

The job of the bullsnake was slightly easier and also went better than planned, making me look really good! They rigged up a large tree branch, and the snake (who probably measures about 5 or 6 feet and is a little thicker than my wrist) had to crawl along the branch, turn around and crawl back, but staying in frame the whole time! I used Thunder, the male of the pair because his temperament is slightly more predictable than Daisy, the females. So I stood on a box, arranged the snake in the tree and had a practice while discussing with the director, art director and cameraman exactly what they wanted to achieve, shot it, and got it on the second take!!! I even got a round of applause for my shots!! I was really pleased but it had been a touch day. My call time was 2pm, the studio was over 90 degrees farenheight and my shot was the last of the day, so I didn’t get out of the studio until 12.25am and was home and unloaded by 2.45am. Luckily all my waiting around in the studio was made more enjoyable by Jack, who was either a runner or part of the art department (I never found out), and we hit it off right away when I helped him get over his fear of snakes. You don’t often get properly chatting to people on these jobs so it was a nice change to have a bit of company throughout the shoot, as I was there on my own.

The next job was with butterflies. It was filmed a the channel 4 studios in Westminster and it was a commercial for a programme about breast cancer. The ad was only shown for a week and because the show was last week, you won’t see the ad anymore, but Fyf and Emma (work mates) said they saw it and it looked really good. I took 20 tropical butterflies of all shapes sizes and colours, that I collected the day before from a butterfly farm in Stratford. They were filmed flying around inside a huge glass box in front of a backdrop.

Scorpions were the order of the day for the next job, and I also took Rachel, one of our work experience girls along for the ride. I took two imperial scorpions, a large, impressive looking but fairly placid species along to shoot a TV advert for the next Playstation game that will be coming out, titled ‘Just Cause’, for which a scorpion is part of the logo. Luckily I had been supplied with a storyboard before hand for this one, though my busy schedule meant I’d not managed a single practice. The scorpions were new, too, having only arrived a week previously, after the death of my super star tame scorpion popped her clogs. So these two, named midnight and magic (the former being shortly changed by Rachel to Legoless, in ode of his missing leg), were pretty fresh. I used magic first, with it being the best looking. She was feisty to say the least, but after a while shooting, was brilliant, despite trying to sting and pinch me repeatedly and with much zeal. What Magic had to do was crawl into shot over what looked like a wall (it was actually horizontal like a table top, but will appear on the screen as a vertical surface) with cracked and worn plaster, and onto a poster advertising the game, and stop right between the words ‘just’ and ‘cause’, resting where on the normal posters, the logo of the scorpion is. There were also some extra shots of general scurrying and some close-ups. I was hoping to be able to work her by hand, but quickly realized for safety’s sake, I’d have to use my padded tongs, which certainly took a hammering!


The fourth and most recent job I’ve done this month was last Saturday. It was a big job for the farm, being a Renault Formula 1 summer party. Lots of us went along with animals from our department, and wearing costumes to match the country of origin of our animals. Me and Hannah took loads of reptiles and had an entire marquee/tent to fill with our show and my costume was the best of all- adapted from the Chipperfields circus costume box of outfits used in the crocodile shows, I wore a loincloth made from snake print fabric and leather, all beaded and with raffia side pieces, a leopard print top and breast plate of leather and snake print, and shoulder pieces made from raffia and red feathers. I made matching earrings and a feather head piece too, and accessorised with bangles, lizard tattoos on my feet and my friend Kevin, a 25kg 12 foot Burmese python, and looked the business!!

Other stuff this month…
Went down to Cambridge on the weekend of the 14th, to take my sister Daisy to Chessington world of adventures on the Friday for her birthday (which was actually on the Sunday). We went in he gorgeous new ford Capri, which was great fun, and we had a really nice day. That evening I heard that the Big Day Out, a summer festival held in Camb every year was starting that night, so I walked down to the green to watch the original version of King Kong being shown on a huge open air screen. My Dad came and met me and we really enjoyed the picture.

On the Saturday I spent the day helping my mum with her vintage clothing stand at the Big Day Out, with the help of Flossy, my little white ferret, who slept on my lap all day. After the stall was packed up I sat out and enjoyed some live bands with Daisy, went out for a meal with mum and then went to meet Daisy and some friends in the pub. Saturday morning I had to head back to work very early so missed the final day in Camb, which was all world music and probably really good.

Last Friday I helped my bosses partner Bobby at the Ascot music festival with her stall, doing air brush tattooing, which was really good fun and went on late into the night, ending up selling glow sticks to all the punters watching the bands, and burning my knee doing 5 laps of a kiddies inflatable assault course against Beth (below) and Hannah, my work mates who came down to help later on. All good clean fun!!

Oh yes, and my pet snake collection has increased to 5 now as well!!!

Me and babies Meg the Egg, Jack and Sprog.

A day in the life of...

A few weeks back, on my day off, I went into Parkside, my old secondary school where I now spend as much time I can (although of late this is shamefully little) painting on the walls of one of the science labs, a mural project I’ve been playing around with for around the last 6 or 7 years. Whenever I go in (sometimes accompanied by any one of my pet ferrets or snakes), I usually end up chipping in or taking over classes, answering all kinds of questions about animals, and showing pictures or videos on the interactive white board. So anyway, I popped in on Friday to drop some camel pictures off for Hilary, the teacher there, and while loading them onto her computer, they came up on the white board so I talked the kids through them. It was a class who’d never met me before and Hilary asked me to tell them what a typical day at work is like for me. For once, I was lost for words!! So it got me thinking, and I’ve been meaning to do this on the blog for ages, as a few friends have asked before what my daily routine is like, so here we go…

Every day is different, because of different film/media jobs we may be sent on, or if a work mate is away, you might help cover a different section from your own, or assist a work mate in training or giving medicine to one of their animals, if there’s a job on site (we have our own film studio) you might be looking after the crew or guests or help on the job, prepare boxes and equipment for a job, make or sort out a food order, etc, etc. And of course, site maintenance varies, from gardening/weeding to repainting fences, building or repairing enclosures, etc. So there’s always plenty to do!

On my section, there are set days for doing different tasks, because I look after 126 individual reptiles, amphibians, mammals and fish (plus over a hundred cockroaches and giant stick insects) it’s obviously too much work to feed them all on the same day, for example, and it’s not necessary to feed these kind of animals every day. So Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are when all the salad eaters get their fruit and veg. These animals are all the tortoises, herbivorous invertebrates, and lizards like iguanas, uromastyx, blue tongued skink, etc. Each animals salad is made up slightly differently to suit its specific dietry requirements, individual fussiness and mouth size. When I feed the tortoises, a little ti,me is spent training them, as at the moment I am teching them to come when I call them by clapping so it’s easier to move them around, because some are too heavy to carry and on the days they don’t get fed salads, I put them into a grassy paddock next door to their yard, to share the grass with the kangaroos.

Tuesdays and Thursdays are insect feed days, where all the animals that eat brown or black crickets, hoppers or locusts are fed. These animals are the carnivorous invertebrates (tarantulas and scorpions), a lot of the lizards and geckos, and all the amphibians (giant marine toads, bullfrog, horned frogs, fire salamander, whites tree frogs). Some of the insect eaters are fed by hand to ensure every animal in the vivarium gets some, or if the animal is old, blind or sick, to encourage them to keep weight on or help them out a bit.

Mice are fed to all the small snakes on a Thursday. By small snakes, I mean everything that is not a python. The small snakes bracket actually includes small and medium animals, some of the larger mediums being around 5 or 6 feet long. This also includes all the venomous snakes and lizards (various rattlesnakes and cobras, copperheads, white-lipped tree viper and gila monsters) and pinkies are fed to the marine toads and whites tree frogs.

The pythons, boa constrictor and anacondas are fed rats every other Monday or Tuesday, and the crocodiles, alligators and monitor lizard are fed weekly around mid week (Wednesday or Thursday). The crocodilians get chicken, pork, venison or horse- whatever is lying around really- also the smaller ones sometimes get fish, and any rats I have left over on Thursdays goes to these guys. It’s better for their health if they get a variety of foods. When I do the croc feeds I usually chuck a bit in for our salvator monitor lizaed too, and he often gets a rat or two on Thursdays aswell.

Finally, the piranha tanks and electric eels are fed sprats and cichlid chow (frozen diet of small bloodworms and stuff) every other day.

So you can see, there is feeding to do nearly every day. Feeding the snakes takes the longest, almost an entire afternoon sometimes (you get the rodents out first thing in the morning so they’re defrosted after lunch), as individuals must be separated into boxes so they don’t fight over the food and everyone gets their ration, and those not separated need to be supervised, and most are given the food by hand with a set of forceps.

So that’s all the feeding stuff! AS well as those tasks that may be different each day, I have a set routine first thing in the morning and last thing at night, which goes like this:

8.30-10.30am Start work. Switch all the lights on in the reptile room, check everyone is alive and well and has water, mist the amphibians. Get out any frozen food that needs to be thawed for the day. Nip over to the feed shed and prepare breakfast for the armadillos and squirrel monkeys (‘dillos get a blended mixture of banana, cottage cheese, rice and dog food, the squirrel monkeys get baby porridge with supplements in and a slice of bread ). Go and open up the tortoise house, feeding the armadillos and squirrel monkeys who live in here too) and let the armadillos out of the weather is nice. Feed the lemur and meerkat in there a slice of bread each and let the tortoises out. Brush, wash down and scrub the floor in the tortoise house and on their yard and change all the waters. If the weather is nice and it’s a Tuesday, Thursday or Sunday, put the tortoises out to grass, and finally, let Spud, the meerkat out to run around on the yard. After that, take yesterdays bowls back to the feed shed to be cleaned and on my way back to the reptile house clean the filter barrel in the koi fishpond and feed the fish, and walk down the bottom to check the piranha tanks and dwarf crocodile in the hippo house. Then I get back into the reptile house and change or top up waters that need it, remove any sloughed snake skins and net the python pool if they’ve pooed in the water. Make a mental (or written!) nte of what needs to be done for the day, such as cutting bramble for the stick insects, any tanks that need cleaning out, or glass that needs cleaning, medication to be given, feeds to be prepared or equipment to be gathered together for a film job. It is all those miscellaneous tasks that keep me busy most of the day, mainly the feeding and cleaning parts. Often I have to go and assist in cleaning out and maintaining the marine fish tanks at our bosses house, and doing this frequently takes most of a morning or afternoon.
Lunch is from 1pm until 2pm.
My consistent evening schedule is shaped like this:
4.30pm – Prepare tortoise house feeds (this is bowls of food for the squirrel monkeys, meerkat and lemur), round up the tortoises and rally them all inside (this can take a while if they’ve been in the kangaroo place as it’s a bit of a walk for them, although it is getting a lot easier as their training progresses), feed the monkeys, lemur and meerkat, and the turtles (fly river turtle, map turtle and yellow bellied terrapin), check waters, shut armadillos in, lights off, lock door. Go and shut up and reptile house, which involves a quick check of all the animals and their water dishes, sweeping and mopping the floor, misting all the tanks with amphibians in, marking off my tick sheets (a kind of register filled out every day for each individual animal) and sick reports (any animals on medication or suffering illness have medical reports filled out each day with all the details of their condition and treatment) and finally switching all the lights out and shut the door!

5.30pm – Finished! (Although it’s usually more like 6pm!)

I bet that sounds pretty boring. Of course what everyone usually hears is mad adventure stories and glamour!! Of course we somehow fit all that in as well and it makes things more exciting...