UNCANNY by name…

Sometimes, a name is so apt that it’s, well, uncanny – and Pulse Films’ directing duo George Muncey and Elliott Elder, live up to their moniker in more than one way. 

It’s not only the weird and wonderful quality of their work: a boundary-pushing, process-driven approach rich in technical trickery and made-you-look-twice moments, that has seen them send a tub of moisturiser on a transatlantic journey, subvert the concept of selfies with modern-day smoke and mirrors, and breathe life into a cyborg with vocal chords. Or the fact you won’t find a decent photograph of the pair together. 

We kept these weird Batman hours where you work the full day and then go home and start your other projects at night.

Even the way they met has a touch of the mystical. They began following each other on Instagram during lockdown, got chatting online, then discovered “all these weird, nuanced connections”, like the fact Muncey, a photographer, had unknowingly shot the architectural features of the building which housed Elder’s studio. “It felt like destiny,” says Muncey.

Drawn together by “a mutual love of making stuff and experimenting”, the pair spent several years working together, yet remotely, on small, self-initiated side projects alongside their day jobs: “We kept these weird Batman hours where you work the full day and then go home and start your other projects at night,” remembers Elder. 

UNCANNY became official off the back of their first proper brief – an animated visual album for hip-hop boy band Brockhampton’s Road Runner, which compellingly – and freakily – captured the band members warping from their past to their present selves. At that point, Muncey and Elder hadn’t physically met, but quickly came up with the name, made an Instagram account, posted the video and “watched the emails roll in.” 

Nike's Own The Floor was the duo's first commercial.

The most recent message to hit their inbox came direct from Nike: a brief to shoot the latest instalment of its Own The Floor campaign. The result - a dizzying, dazzling, dynamic display of breakdance, vogueing and afrobeats – is so confident that it’s hard to believe it’s UNCANNY’s debut commercial, much less the work of directors who just, as Elder puts it, “autopiloted” into the craft. 

“We never set out to be a director duo,” he says. “A lot of the videos we make, it’s incidental [that] they end up being videos – in theory, they could exist in another medium. It’s just that the creative landscape lends itself to us making videos right now.” 

We try to grasp one kind of idea or process and explore that to its fullest potential. Seeing how far we can push it and bending the rules.

From the lyrical one-take of Loyle Carner’s Nobody Knows (Ladas Road) to the frenetic clash of old-school video graphics and lo-fi live-action in Danny Brown’s Tantor, the sheer variety of genres, tools and techniques showcased in Uncanny’s reel makes it hard to define their aesthetic – though Muncey has a go. “We try to grasp one kind of idea or process and explore that to its fullest potential. Seeing how far we can push it and bending the rules - potentially to the point of breaking said process.” 

I’ve got that kind of fucked-up animator brain where I don't mind skimming through frame by frame and making sure everything's aligned and perfect.

That lack of a template extends to their creative process, too. While there’s often a rough division of labour after the initial creative brainstorm – Muncey handles the shoot, cameras and equipment, Elder oversees the edit (“I’ve got that kind of fucked-up animator brain where I don't mind skimming through frame by frame and making sure everything's aligned and perfect”) – the degree of collaboration is always different, says Muncey: “Every project is a completely new way of tackling things.  We write treatments in a similar manner but when it actually comes to making anything, we are pretty structureless and fluid.”

UNCANNY's promo for Danger Mouse's Strangers was achieved with a simple phone and mirror rig followed by a complex, meticulous edit. 

Having the confidence to work in such an experimental way is something Muncey attributes to their non-classical filmmaking backgrounds (he’s a documentary and fine art photographer, while Elder is an interdisciplinary designer with animation experience who’s worked with I-D magazine, Virgil Abloh and Pharrell Williams). “I think more like a photographer than a director, and Elliott thinks more like a designer than a director – which creates a weird melting point that is unique in terms of approach, whether that’s how we pace something or compose it or leading to brand new ideas altogether,” he explains.

Often, that looks like taking a prosaic object, and casting it in a new light. “Having that constant, or something that you're familiar with, actually gives us more room to be experimental and shoot in a slightly strange way or edit it in a way with a bit more mystique,” says Elder. Take their spot for Selfridges, promoting the launch of skincare brand Humanrace, which sees a small green pot of face cream spinning in space - a classic product shot that soon transforms into an epic journey from founder Pharrell’s bathroom, across the US, over the pond, past London landmarks and finally onto the shelves of the legendary department store. While the process involved “a bit of editing trickery”, admits Elder, it was mainly the pair “marching around London, lobbing the camera and the product in the air, and getting some people in New York and LA to do the same.”

We approached it like designing a poster or a book, where you spend forever making everything as consistent as possible.

They tweaked a similarly everyday concept – the mirror selfie – in their promo for Danger Mouse’s Strangers. In the video, a who’s who of hip-hop, including Run The Jewels and A$AP Rocky, film themselves on iPhones performing their parts – but it takes a good minute to clock that the phone at the centre of the action remains fixed, while the stars revolve around its orbit. 

“We were obsessed with trying to find a framework to unite all of these unexpected rappers who had never [performed] together on a track before,” explains Elder. “And we wanted a way to slightly trip up the viewer - just enough to make them turn their head and think - why does it feel a little bit off?” The solution was an ostensibly simple phone and mirror rig, followed by a “headache-inducing edit” to align all the frames: “We approached it like designing a poster or a book, where you spend forever making everything as consistent as possible.” 

The music video for Loyle Carner’s Nobody Knows (Ladas Road) was a one take shoot. 

By contrast, the surreal, one-take video for Nobody Knows (Ladas Road) was more about getting a single, perfect shot on the day, using rare infrared tech and a bleeding-edge camera – a modified Alexa 65, one of only three in the world and fresh off the set of Dune 2 – to distort the scale, reverse tones and create an eerie and almost alien world. They’d envisaged just “plonking a camera on a tripod and hitting the zoom button”, but the size of the Alexa’s sensor meant the lens could no longer handle the distance of zoom needed to film the video. Enter a 50-foot crane…  

Our aesthetic might be process-driven, but there’s still an implied narrative underpinning the work.

As with all magic tricks, it’s fascinating to get a peek behind the curtain - but the pair maintain that they don’t want to be known for gimmickry, and the ‘why’ is just as, if not more, important as the ‘how’. “Even though we use a lot of processes and tools, it’s never the case that we're throwing everything and the kitchen sink at [an idea], and just trying to make a trippy edit,” says Elder. “Our aesthetic might be process-driven, but there’s still an implied narrative underpinning the work.” By constantly testing the boundaries of methods, techniques and tools, he adds, they’re able to tell stories through previously unexplored means.

So, in Ladas Road, the use of infra-red captures the track’s preoccupation with growing up mixed race, and feeling as though you don’t belong to either race.  “It blurs those lines visually, as it’s a technology which doesn't necessarily perceive many differences in complexity,” explains Muncey. Meanwhile, to visualise the fleeting, transitory nature of a relationship in Deb Never’s Momentary Sweetheart, they built a self-overwriting video tool, printing the images on ephemeral materials such as paper.