He has had a long and successful acting career, including such titles as The Hobbit and Pork Pie, but today Dean O'Gorman wallows in mud.

The actor pulls a sledgehammer above his head and teenage boys watch as it comes smashing down on a pile of dirty bricks. The debris roll into mud pool oblivion and O'Gorman chuckles. The more mess, the better. "I had a digger in," he says. "They had to really destroy this."

The boys are covered in mud, their khaki green uniforms splattered with mud. O'Gorman's car, it's covered in mud. A water pump has smeared dirt along the canvas and sitting by the open boot, a young man carries on counting bullets regardless.

CHRIS SKELTON/STUFF Dean O'Gorman is recreating scenes from the WWI Battle of Passchendaele.

For the last 10 or so years, O'Gorman has been splitting his time between acting and photography. This is another one of those photography projects, involving recreating his own Passchendaele battlefield next to Auckland Airport.

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It follows on from a documentary in which O'Gorman investigates the First World War 1917 Battle of Passchendaele. They call it "some of New Zealand's darkest hours" with a huge loss of life in the those Belgian trenches. Records show 843 New Zealanders died within a few hours.

CHRIS SKELTON/STUFF The actor convinced strangers, students and friends to get into muddy holes filled with freezing water. He says it's been surprisingly easy.

O'Gorman is now looking to recreate the scenes, in tribute. He has dug up a farm, a friend's property near the airport. The trenches have become grotty, muddy pools and O'Gorman expects his mostly young models to get in them.

Wind belts the paddock, so feverishly that the "war horses" O'Gorman has organised for the shoot have been delayed. Yet O'Gorman scuttles around the mud piles regardless, wheeling out barbed wires and planks. The conditions, O'Gorman has discovered, were far worse back in 1917.

Young men and their horses drowned in the trenches, the mud immobilising troops. They were fighting not only Germany, but mother nature.

CHRIS SKELTON/STUFF Dean O'Gorman has starred in The Hobbit, Goodbye Pork Pie and Westside, but he also takes still photography.

"It was shelled and bombed so much that the ground was decimated, it was just shell holes and water," O'Gorman says.

This Passchendaele project started recently, in February when NZ On Air and The Canadian Media Fund gave O'Gorman and his crew just over $430,000. It's already live, with the interactive documentary Spurred On and stories from Belgium available on Stuff.

"I have always had an interest in World War One," O'Gorman says, but he knew little about the Battle of Passchendaele until this process began. In the documentary, O'Gorman follows the stories of five Wellington brothers who share his surname. "For it to only matter if you're related to someone, that may be a little selfish," he remarks after the journey.

CHRIS SKELTON/STUFF Abut eight models partake in a WWI photography shoot.

For O'Gorman, his interest in researching and recreating aspects of the first world war go back a long time. He photographed his grandfather, a World War Two veteran, for an earlier project. And he shot portraits for an earlier version of The Passchendaele Project, with models dressed as soldiers in a bleak studio. This, with dug out trenches and horrendous conditions, is a step up.

O'Gorman organises these shoots through scrounging from friends and strangers. "They're really happy to help out with something like this," he says. One of the young men, soon to be lying in cold muddy water, is 19-year-old Ben Geden. Soldier-for-a-day Ben is in this mud hole because he served O'Gorman coffee once.

In between working in film, O'Gorman finds time to construct these environments for still photography. "It works pretty well together, the camera is pretty portable so I tend to take it most places when I'm shooting," he says. And O'Gorman does get around: before securing funding for Spurred On he was in Los Angeles. The remake of Goodbye Pork Pie only came out in February too, in which O'Gorman plays a leading role. "It's been a good year," he says, plenty of work.

CHRIS SKELTON/STUFF So much mud.

Now that those films are all out though, O'Gorman is focusing in on photography. "I'm not super good when I split my focus," he says. It took about three weeks just to set up this small mud pit. Then the actor spent days in the wind, waiting for the sun to reach the right point.

When the props, the gear, the crew, are funded almost entirely from O'Gorman's pocket, why does he do this? "It's just a passion project," he says. The actor reckons it's worth losing a few dollars for these photos because as we enter the 100th anniversary of the Battle for Passchendaele, O'Gorman wants people to ask why these soldiers died.

"The photos are about New Zealanders involvement in Passchendaele, but war in general. That was one battle where a lot of New Zealanders fought and a lot of New Zealanders died. It brings up some very poignant questions about why did we go there and what did it mean?"

CHRIS SKELTON/STUFF Actor and photographer Dean O'Gorman has transformed an Auckland paddock into a mock war zone.

These days, O'Gorman thinks Kiwis wouldn't be so willing to fight like they did. If politics changed, and history repeated though, he wants these photos and these 100-year-old stories to be remembered.

Spurred On is live now at www.SpurredOn.nz, read more there or in our series of stories at Stuff.