Young Fathers Heat Things Up Using Military Thermal Camera
Following its Apple Music exclusive, Oscar Hudson's groundbreaking new music video for Young Fathers' 'Holy Ghost' is now available everywhere.
Filmed using a rare, high-powered military thermal camera (or as Young Fathers’ Graham ‘G’ Hastings describes it: “Shot in Infra-Dead™”) on location in Perthshire, Scotland, the 'Holy Ghost' video combines cinematography, surveillance and choreography to unique effect.
Talking about the 'Holy Ghost' video, director Oscar Hudson says: “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 war zone we found one 30 minutes away in Hertfordshire (big thanks to Silent Sentinel who let us take it out!).
“I didn’t want to use the camera for its haunting aesthetic alone, nor do a video medley of experiments with hot and 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 its operator and we fully embraced its 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.”
