Hugh Mulhern's delirious call

Splicing together stop motion animation, found footage, live-action, and AI-generated sequences, the Riff Raff Nursery of Evil director creates a sensory overload for Hak Baker's Telephones 4 Eyes that is not for the faint-hearted.

by Jamie Madge on 17^th February 2023

Hak Baker – Telephones 4 Eyes

Credits

Production Company Riff Raff
Director Hugh Mulhern

Unlock full credits and more with a Source + shots membership.

Learn More Or Log In

Credits

Production Company Riff Raff
Director Hugh Mulhern
Editor The Assembly Rooms
Producer Alexander Handschuh
Executive Producer Laura Clayton
DP Eoin McLoughlin
Editor Joseph Taylor

Credits powered by

Hold onto your hats (and stomachs) before hitting play on this blistering promo from Hugh Mulhern, as the trip is about as wild as it gets.

Created by the Riff Raff 'Nursery of Evil' director, Telephone’s 4 Eyes matches the angry, urgent vocals of grime artist Hak Baker with a terrifying montage of dystopia, incorporating stop motion, found footage, live-action, and AI-generated sequences.

Disturbing and captivating at the same time, the film wears its underground/gruey influences on its sleeve, cleverly distorting the every day into the grotesque at such a frenetic pace that it feels breathless in its innovation.

‘Myself and Hak working together has been something bubbling for quite some time," explains Mulhern. "The brief was wonderfully open and Hak wanted directors to push it as far as they could. I’m always a bit skeptical when people they say that, so I gave Hak a buzz and asked him “how far can we go?” and he said, “go as mad as you can!”

"If I told you I had an initial rationale for everything in the video and it was all carefully figured out, I’d be lying. In truth, it was one of those ideas that came together almost instantaneously. I think that’s to do with how clear Hak’s ideas are in the song. Tetsuo the Iron Man was a key image and I also think the inside of [the song’s producer] Dan Carey’s studio played a part in inspiring our phone thief’s lab. HR Giger meets Abe’s Odyssey circa this weird stop motion cartoon called Mr Bumpy.

"We spent hours figuring out what found footage felt right and was obscure enough to feed the sensation of overstimulation. We intentionally wanted to steer away from doing anything that felt too political or pointed when the song was carrying that message so effectively (maybe I’ve matured since wanting to set fire to Boris)

"Things went off the deep end in the final few days of the video. We sent some stuff over to Dom (infinite.vibes) to create AI sequences stylistically informed by the stop motion animation and what he sent back far exceeded my expectations. It’s my favourite thing I’ve made to date and all I wanna do now is expand on the techniques we experimented with.”