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Into the Library in association withLBB
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Into the Library with Oscar Hudson

15/02/2023
Production Company
London, UK
356
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Oscar Hudson talks to LBB’s Zoe Antonov about his first ever film, the pressure behind creating a John Lewis Christmas ad, and his galaxy of communist aliens

'The Creative Library' is LBB’s exciting new launch. It’s been months - years, probably - in the making and we reckon our re-tooled archive will change the way you work, whether you’re a company looking to store and share your work, or a marketer or creative looking for new partners or inspiration for your latest project.
 
This isn’t a dusty old archive. It’s an easy-to-search, paywall-free library where all our members can store and share all of their reels and creative work.

To coincide, we’re also launching a new regular feature called ‘Into the Library’ where we catch up with the industry’s most influential directors to talk about their directorial highlights past and present. Think of it as a director’s reel showcase with a big dollop of personality. We interview directors about their favourite commercials and music videos from their reel to find out about how these works shaped them as a director.

Today’s spotlight shines on Oscar Hudson, and his never ending arsenal of surprises. 


I taught myself to shoot and edit when I was around 13 by filming my friends' skateboarding and jumping into bushes and I've never stopped since then. My first-ever project was a film I made as a 12 year old called ‘backwards movie’. It was about me eating, drinking, and jumping from high places and playing them in reverse. It was art. 

In my late teens, I started doing occasional jobs as a cheap one-man band DSLR video guy – filming a lot of gigs, interviews, and dull corporate conferences. Meanwhile, I began studying anthropology – an amazing degree that pushed me to think harder about the act of looking at, documenting and representing people and things. I think in many ways anthropology set my eye for a lot of the ideas that define my approach as a director to this day. 

After I graduated, I worked as an assistant to a food photographer for a while before work picked up doing all sorts of music, fashion and culture 'content’ assignments through online mags like Dazed, i-D and Nowness. Which in turn led to low-budget music videos, which led to slightly less low-budget music videos, which led to ads and so on and so on.
 
What kept me going then and keeps me going now is a desire to experiment and explore new things, ideas, and experiences. I always want to feel everything I'm doing has at least one original thing about it. I also love the pleasure of the process. I really love the process. 
 
The next goal is to transition the things I love about filmmaking into long form and make some feature films. And once I've done that, the ultimate goal will be to keep doing it until I break into small pieces and float away.


Bonobo - No Reason


My Bonobo music video. It was the first time I felt I'd made something that represented the kind of thing I wanted to make. It also received a lot of positive industry attention and probably ‘levelled me up’ in terms of people thinking I had special powers.



B&Q - Flip


My last project (that’s out currently) was the B&Q ad where we flipped a double-sided house upside down. It was a genuine feat of civil engineering and a proper, proper challenge for myself, and all involved… Which is exactly what I always want from a project. The B&Q film relates closely to the 'Backwards Movie’ from when I was 12, through its employment of an innovative technical process to extract visual pleasure from the most mundane of moments of lived experience. That’s a joke but also it isn’t.



A Second World


Aside from the seminal 'Backwards Movie’, I'm probably most proud of 'A Second World '- a film I shot in 2014 (before anyone cared what I was doing) with long-time collaborator, friend, and DP – Ruben Wooding Dechamp. It’s a short doc about a lonely Serbian man who talks to a galaxy of communist Aliens, abandoned futurist monuments and nostalgia for Tito-era Yugoslavia. Ruben and I slept in a Transit van for a month driving all around the Balkans making the film on zero budget and producing something that I still think is so special. They put it in the Getty Museum in LA and to this day we still receive emails from Balkan people to whom the film really means something. Feedback like that is worth a lot more to me than any industry prize I've ever won.



Gilligan Moss - Ceremonial


This was the project that probably taught me the most from my portfolio. I wrote an overly ambitious idea for an early music video with nowhere near enough money and asked too much of my friends, who agreed to make it with me, and we all came away broken, sad, and pissed-off after an extremely painful 24-hour (if not more) outdoor shoot in a wet and wintery field. Being a good director is as much about how you treat your collaborators as it is about what you choose to put on a screen. And you learn that fast when you treat your collaborators poorly.



John Lewis - Give a Little Love


Let’s talk a bit more about challenges and difficulties. It was an honour to be asked to do the John Lewis Christmas Ad… But it was also a big, horrible burden to do it. There's a lot of pressure and expectation on it every year but perhaps even more so with our one as it was going to be the different-from-the-usual, mostly animated, pandemic fitted one. 

A big, multi-animator, flowing celebration of love and collaboration. The problem was the only thing that animators ask for is loads of time and we didn’t have it to give ‘em… Which meant for me the experience was like directing 10 films on top of each other. There were times I felt I was drowning in it all. Urgent emails flooding in quicker than I could read them, approving Claymation takes from bed at 3am, crisis meetings with Oscar-winning animators to debate a snowman’s relationship to his own flesh. Justifying to a legal department why it’s safe for a pigeon to operate a plane… And does it actually matter if the 222 bus doesn't ACTUALLY go to Tooting? Oh, and I got covid in the middle of it all too. 

But we got there, and I got to work with some absolutely incredible artists along the way. And for every arse on Twitter who saw it and said ‘meh’ or ‘bring back the dog on the trampoline' or ‘it’s bloody PC gone mad!’ There was another soppy sod who said it made ‘em cry and obviously I love making people cry.




Apple - Bounce


But, it’s not all just tears. This is probably the most fun project I’ve taken up so far. Apple Bounce was an absolute joy, just because of how unbelievably playful and silly that bouncy world was to create. The pleasure involved with conceiving such weird physical stunts and seeing them brought to life on such an epic scale was amazing. Not only a truly dream job, but some childhood fantasy stuff came to life in the world we created for the film.


Credits
Work from Pulse Films
Everyday
IAG Loyalty
25/03/2024
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Grow Like Only A Teacher Can
Department for Education
15/01/2024
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ALL THEIR WORK