Pulse Films gets an Oscar (Hudson)

Do you enjoy inventive visuals, engaging shorts and compelling docs? Then look no further...

Oscar Hudson's work caught our eye when he won the 'Best New Director' award at the 2016 UK VMA's back in October of last year. 

Oscar started of crafting skateboarding videos and then naturally ended up creating music promos for artists like Radiohead, Gilligan Moss, Sundara Karma & One Night Only. Over the last few years he has also put together some rather fascinating shorts that have screened at the BFI London Film Festival, Camerimage & Hamburg ISFF.

Since then he has gone onto produce one of the finest music promos of 2017 so far with his Bonobo ft. Nick Murphy 'No Reason' promo. The videos themes revolve around a rather interesting phenomenon originating In Japan of the 'Hikikomori'. The Hikikomori are reclusive adolescents or adults who withdraw from social life, often seeking extreme degrees of isolation and confinement. 

Luckily for us this is not the case with Oscar, so we caught up with him after his recent signing to Pulse Films and chatted about technical difficulties filming the Bonobo video, using practical special effects and his short film portfolio.

Your recent video for Bonobo ft. Nick Murphy 'No Reason' is totally brilliant, how did you come up with the idea?

With this idea the technical aspect fell into place first and the thematic/narrative elements followed after. I had been thinking about small cameras and how to take advantage of their size with a visual idea and from that the idea of a series of shrinking rooms arose. Then it was a case of paring that with a narrative that fit with the physical concept, which is where the hikikomori theme came into the picture.

The video looks fantastic, how difficult was it to achieve the effects in camera?

It was a lot of labour but was always pretty fun. There’s something about working physically and the tangibility of an idea like this that keeps the process exciting. I think it’s because the work feels quite directly linked to the final product, you can feel the idea taking shape and then see the finished set with your eyes and basically get it right away. Where as perhaps in many other types of film making there is a greater distance between the minutiae of process and the final film.

There were an awful lot of technical challenges to overcome on this one, namely that we had to do an entirely custom design for our tiny camera rig to get it to move forwards without a visible track and be small enough to get it through those little spaces. Then obviously building 18 identical sets complete with shrinking props.

The video has great practical special effects, it reminds us of Michel Gondry’s style. Was this an inspiration?

I love Michel Gondry’s work and no doubt there’s a lot of stylistic cross over in some of what I’ve done but I never actually look at it directly for inspiration, at least not consciously. His work is exciting and inspiring… but I think maybe cos of the similarites it’s all the more important to steer clear of holding it up as too much of a bible. I try to be as original as I can be with my films, but I’ve been noticing more and more that when you do something original (or at least you think you’ve found something slightly new) it paradoxically seems to invite people to point out where they think you’ve stolen the idea from! People are telling me I pinched this Bonobo idea from the intro to something called Tatami Galaxy… I mean… I dunno... google it and see what you reckon haha!

How long did it take to make all of the miniatures and to produce the sets?

From green light to wrap we were on the case for about 6 weeks total, but of course this wasn’t all build time… and christmas and new years happened in the middle of it all too. It took two and half days to get the set up in the studio and Robin Crowley our model maker was making tiny teapots right up to the moment we turned over.

Are you pleased with how it all turned out?

Yeah definitely, unusually I was pretty happy with the film almost immediately. Normally the filmmaking process makes you fall out of love with your film by the end of it all and it then takes a few weeks for you to see the merit in it again... but this time I must confess I was pretty happy right away.

Your 'Money Face' video for Darwin Deez 'The Mess She Made' is another creative gem, how did the concept for this come about?

I was on holiday in Morocco playing with the king of Morocco’s face on the banknotes and just started folding it and lining it up with my friends faces and sniggering to myself. It was a stupid little idea that I forgot about for years and years before it suddenly came back to me whilst my mind was a bit more on a music video vibe. Darwin was just perfect for it because he doesn’t take himself too seriously, I can’t imagine Rihanna going for that one.

Are the characters and locations in your short film 'Lord & Lidl' based on real life experiences?

Yep. It’s a big weaving together of various ideas and events of the period leading up to shooting. A man grabbing me by the hand and claiming to be Jesus outside Lidl. Conversations about what God would eat and how the inside of our bodies are actually dark places. Moving to Tottenham and getting fascinated by all the religion in the area… and the diversity of the faiths all crammed into such a small area. Finding a line of sonorous bollards that you can dong-dong-dong on as you walk past (on the way to Lidl as it happens). All the locations were just cool spots near my house that I’d found on dog walks. The film was basically designed to serve the things I had to hand and was finding interesting at the moment when it was made. 

How did you discover the world & people behind your fascinating 2016 short film 'A Second World'?

Ruben Woodin-Dechamps who is my good friend and regular DP (and with whom I co-directed ‘A Second World’) had been out to Serbia and had discovered both Ljuba (the main man in the film) and the monuments too. We decided to over together to make what we thought would be a short character piece on Ljuba and his alien world using the monuments as alien-like visual illustrations for his universe. But once we got there it started to become apparent that we were onto something way more interesting and politically complicated.

How long did the shoot take? and where there any language barriers?

We were out there for three weeks living in the back of windowless transit van. It was just Ruben & I travelling around with a Serbian translator. We basically made the film by tracking down each monument one by one (they aren’t marked on maps… it’s a real local knowledge treasure hunt thing) and then knocking on the nearest door and interviewing locals about them. It was very much a feeling our way through it type process and without fail our interviews would descend into a rakija fuelled piss ups. It was a truly amazing experience.

We are intrigued by the trailer for your upcoming short 'Joy In People'. Can you tell us about it?

‘Joy In People’ is about nationalism. It follows a reclusive young man called Ben who is on a quest to find the joy in other people. He experiments with various large crowds (Church, Rush-hour, Far right rallies) before discovering the throbbing, chanting crowds of football and somehow ends up going to the Euro 2016 footy tournament over in Paris chasing the massive crowds that’ll be there. He doesn’t really understand the intense nationalism of football and brings a bag full of all the national shirts from the different countries so he can be part of all the crowds and inevitably gets rejected for breaking the ‘rules' of nationalism.

I hate when people call their work ‘experimental’ but this film was definitely, for me, an untested way of making a fictional story. We shot it all in real, and very unpredictable, crowds and 95% of the scenes feature our lead actor talking with people who don’t know they’re on camera, so we’re eliciting real reactions from real people and you can definitely tell. I wanted very much to make a fictional story that felt like it was arising from within real-world events. At a time when nationalism is politically on the rise and borders are becoming more and more ’sacred', I wanted to make a film that borrowed directly from the strangely sanitised nationalistic spectacle of the Euro football tournament to try and challenge people’s idea of what nationalism is and what it does.

What is next?

Well I’ve just joined Pulse Films and I’m excited to do more projects with them. Hopefully Joy In People can make it’s mark on the festival circuit and I can make some more music videos. I’d love to get another doc project in the go too… I just wanna be productive and work on a good mix of project, both big and shiny & small and weird.