Young Fathers: Holy Ghost

The new promo for Young Fathers, directed by Pulse Films' Oscar Hudson, has been filmed on location in Scotland and has used a rare, high-powered military thermal camera to combine cinematography, surveillance and choreography to unique effect.

"For such a high tech thing it had an amazingly lo-fi user interface, it was like a fax machine."

“[It is a] a piece of kit generally used by the military for border security and other unfriendly war-zone type operations that involve spotting people who are a long way away," explains Hudson. "It was super-difficult to actually get our hands on one as they aren’t very many of them out there and the ones that do exist circulate solely within the surveillance industry rather than the film industry. It was really interesting reaching out across that line because whilst the two worlds share so much in common, they speak entirely different languages and operate in very different ways. But after months of scouring the Earth in search of one that wasn’t stuck in a war zone we found one 30 mins away in Hertfordshire (big thanks to Silent Sentinel who let us take it out!)

Hudson says he was mostly interested in the camera's range and functionality as a piece of surveillance gear, and wanted to make that aspect a core part of the language and narrative of the film.

The whole promo is shot from one single camera position, 300m away, at the top of a wet mountain in Scotland. "We spent the whole day up there wrestling with the camera which was more or less operated via a calculator," adds Hudson. "For such a high tech thing it had an amazingly lo-fi user interface, it was like a fax machine. We had to pre-program a list of every camera position then whilst shooting dial in and execute each individual move manually.”