After kicking off a string of summer tour dates last night (June 25) in London, Young Fathers have now shared a video for Cocoa Sugar cut "Holy Ghost."
Directed by Oscar Hudson, the clip was shot using a high powered military thermal camera in Perthshire, Scotland. Hudson recalled the experience in tracking down and using the rare piece of gear as follows:
The film was shot on a long range thermal surveillance camera, a piece of kit generally used by the military for border security and other unfriendly war-zone type operations that involve spotting people who are a long way away. It was super difficult to actually get our hands on one as they aren't very many of them out there and the ones that do exist circulate solely within the surveillance industry rather than the film industry. It was really interesting reaching out across that line because whilst the two worlds share so much in common, they speak entirely different languages and operate in very different ways. But after months of scouring the earth in search of one that wasn't stuck in a warzone we found one 30 mins away in Hertfordshire (big thanks to Silent Sentinel who let us take it out!)
I didn't want to use the camera for it's haunting aesthetic alone, nor do a video medley of experiments with hot & cold stuff. Both those aspects are great but I was mostly interested in the camera's range and functionality as a piece of surveillance gear. So we worked to make that aspect a core part of the language and narrative of the film — so the camera itself becomes a character as does it's operator and we fully embraced it's electronic movements and wobbles throughout.
The whole film is shot from one single camera position 300m away from our location at the top of a wet mountain in Scotland. We spent the whole day up there wrestling with the camera which was more or less operated via a calculator. For such a high tech thing it had an amazingly lo-fi user interface, it was like a fax machine. We had to pre-program a list of every camera position then whilst shooting dial in and execute each individual move manually.
Watch the results down below.
Directed by Oscar Hudson, the clip was shot using a high powered military thermal camera in Perthshire, Scotland. Hudson recalled the experience in tracking down and using the rare piece of gear as follows:
The film was shot on a long range thermal surveillance camera, a piece of kit generally used by the military for border security and other unfriendly war-zone type operations that involve spotting people who are a long way away. It was super difficult to actually get our hands on one as they aren't very many of them out there and the ones that do exist circulate solely within the surveillance industry rather than the film industry. It was really interesting reaching out across that line because whilst the two worlds share so much in common, they speak entirely different languages and operate in very different ways. But after months of scouring the earth in search of one that wasn't stuck in a warzone we found one 30 mins away in Hertfordshire (big thanks to Silent Sentinel who let us take it out!)
I didn't want to use the camera for it's haunting aesthetic alone, nor do a video medley of experiments with hot & cold stuff. Both those aspects are great but I was mostly interested in the camera's range and functionality as a piece of surveillance gear. So we worked to make that aspect a core part of the language and narrative of the film — so the camera itself becomes a character as does it's operator and we fully embraced it's electronic movements and wobbles throughout.
The whole film is shot from one single camera position 300m away from our location at the top of a wet mountain in Scotland. We spent the whole day up there wrestling with the camera which was more or less operated via a calculator. For such a high tech thing it had an amazingly lo-fi user interface, it was like a fax machine. We had to pre-program a list of every camera position then whilst shooting dial in and execute each individual move manually.
Watch the results down below.
