Oscar Hudson on Working With Young Thug

Oscar Hudson's new promo for Young Thug will have you checking the ceiling for cannibalistic twins, hairless butlers and notoriously-late rappers... it's eerily shocking and fantastically executed - earning it a shots Hotshot earlier today.

We caught up with the Pulse Films director to find out how he handled the shoot, whether he thought Young Thug would actually show up on-set and what working with him was like... you'd be surprised.

Tell us about the video.

It’s a film about eating I suppose. We spin 360 through a room where we see a man being fattened up by group of hairless butlers before he eventually gets fed to a pair of cannibalistic twins who live on the ceiling. So fairly normal stuff really. The idea was built around the nature of the camera move - how do you take advantage of a motion that spends a lot of time looking at the ceiling? You put rappers and cannibals up there.

How did you achieve the continuous cyclical look of the video?

I was messing around with the idea of swinging camera motions and building some little wooden contraptions that i could strap my iPhone to. Eventually I figured out a rough design that I thought would scale up and then with the help of George Rumsey at Panavision and DOP Ruben Woodin-Dechamps, who had the chance to do a proper test build and to fine tune the thing, long before the shoot. We ultimately ended up shooting the project over in Atlanta where the wonderful DOP Kristian Zuniga picked up the reigns and did a wonderful job.

Having previously worked on the Bonobo video, how did this set up differ?

Even though the two videos share a number of formal qualities, this one was a whole different kettle of fish. Unlike Bonobo it wasn’t a genuine single sequence. We had two identical sets, one of which we built normally, the other, upside-down. We then have hidden cuts between the two. That's how we were able to have people appear to be on the ceiling. We also had not one, but three rappers to feature and to build a shoot schedule around. I’ve not done too many performance videos with artists as big as Young Thug, Meek Mill and Carnage before; it was a pretty surreal world to be parachuted into.

Why did you choose to shoot both videos in-camera instead of using CG?

Physical effects have become the starting point for my approach to music videos. I really enjoy the process of working in that way and the more I do it the more things I think of ideas that I wanna try. It makes being on set feel like you’re participating in some huge experiment and you get instant gratification when something works. It makes the process very tangible for everyone present. No one on set is feeling alienated from a final product that might exist many millions of effect layers later. I’m not anti CG or anything - I mean this video has a heavy smattering computer effects in it - I just have come to appreciate the pleasure of doing stuff in camera.

How did you create the camera rig and how challenging was it?

It wasn’t an existing piece of kit so it was all put together with nuts and bolts and scaffolding bars and such - which made it a little imperfect and impractical - but it worked pretty well overall. The real challenge was trying to match the camera position between two sets - that was tricky.

How long did the shoot take and what were the biggest challenges?

It was a one day shoot following a four day build. The biggest challenge was probably working under the spectre of Young Thug’s previous video for Wyclef Jean. Everyone was constantly joking that he wouldn't show up - and even if that concern was real or imagined - it still impacted on pre-production.

We had a very serious plan B ready to put into action if we found ourselves in that situation. But he showed on time and was actually really patient with the shoot. It wasn’t the kind of film you could video you could just rock up to, do a few performance takes and leave - we needed him and Carnage to stick around right to the bitter end and do very specific stuff otherwise we simply wouldn’t have a video.