David Wilson: Lickety Split

David Wilson’s tireless zeal for experimentation has seen him shooting 6,000 frames of moving face paint and chopping boys’ heads in half. It’s also catapulted him from animator to versatile filmmaker of note. David Knight meets a young man hurtling towards success

David Wilson’s video for Pelican, a track by British indie-rock band, The Maccabees, is a journey from birth to death, and everything in between, represented by objects in outer space, that split down the middle, as the camera speeds towards them. Whether it’s building blocks, bowls of cereal, clocks or handbags, they all divide. Even the heads of four small boys are split open revealing the insides of anatomically correct surgical models. “I wanted these kids looking in wonder at what lies ahead of them,” explains Wilson. “They’re surrounded by toys to begin with, their memory of childhood, and then adult life is essentially what they’re looking up to. Old age is represented by objects, bottle-lens glasses and Murray Mints, as opposed to what it really feels like to be old.”

With its visual ingenuity, wit, and attention to detail, the Maccabees video has the distinctive hallmarks of a David Wilson film – and arguably the boys are a reflection of the director too. Boyish wonder is something he conveys in abundance. The promo also follows a major trend of the director’s last year – it’s not animated. “All the objects are real and were split in half,” he explains. “Just seeing the level of detail that the art department went to was insane. You’d ask them to chop a clock in half, and when they showed it to you, you’d realise they’d had to gut all the insides of clock, cut it in half, then cut all the miniature cogs in half then re-stick them back in. The only thing we couldn’t split in half were the boys…”

Weekend working

This infectiously enthusiastic 26-year-old from Somerset has been responsible for a great deal of wonderment over the past three years. He emerged in 2009 with his remarkable no-budget, animation-based music video for Moray McLaren’s We Got Time, which won Best Budget Video at the UK Music Video Awards that year, where he also landed the gong Best New Director. More work that demonstrated his originality and skill as an animator followed. But in 2011 he began extending his range.

In his acclaimed video for Metronomy’s The Bay, he rebranded the band’s native Torquay as sexy and glamourous, in his ad for the Nokia N8, Barbie-like dolls perform in their own Lady Gaga-style video, and he collaborated on intensely emotional work for singer-songwriter Keaton Henson. For French DJ superstar David Guetta’s Titanium, he made his first foray into narrative drama and, as 2011 ended, he also launched an Alternative Advent calendar, releasing a film every day leading up to Christmas. He’s also been busy with his successful sideline as a VJ.

We’re talking in the library of Blink in Soho, his production company home (he’s with Blinkink for commercials, and Colonel Blimp for promos). It’s evidently a favourite refuge for him, often at the weekend, when he will work happily, usually to pitch on a new project. “Video briefs seem to come in on a Thursday and they usually want them by the following Monday,” he says. “But being here at weekends, when it’s quiet, is actually wonderful.”

Having studied illustration and animation in Brighton and becoming a prolific maker of animated shorts, he became a runner at Blink after graduating. Then he entered a Becks-sponsored competition to make an artwork in just four minutes, filmed on a webcam. His entry was to create a praxinoscope – a pre-cinematic device, like a zoetrope, in which a combination of custom-made record labels, a turntable and mirrors created live, real-time, looped animation. It impressed Blinkink’s Bart Yates so much he commissioned Wilson to make a video of the praxinoscope idea for his soon-to-be brother-in-law Moray McLaren’s song We Got Time.

It got immediate attention, helped along by Wilson’s impressive ‘making of’ film in which he cheerfully explained how it was done. “I wanted to make sure that people knew that the Moray McLaren video was achieved 100% in-camera,” he notes. “But I was also trying to do everything I could to get my next directing job. Coming across well on camera meant that I could communicate well in a meeting, and hopefully get more work.”

Crying over spilt oil

His next video, for We Have Band’s You Came Out, involved animating face paint on the band members and shooting 6,000 frames of the moving face paint designs in the process. Another achievement that helped him move quickly to working with major label signing Little Boots, for two videos, Remedy and Earthquake, both of which were also packed with clever in-camera FX ideas. “Visuals were one of the main things that influenced me to get into animation and directing in the first place,” he says. “When I was a student, local clubs had just installed projectors, so I’d do these little animations, put them on DVD and I’d get loads of gigs.”

His first break directing a proper big-budget commercial came quickly, too. However, events conspired to bring him his first real setback. He created an entirely stop-motion animation ad for BP called Heartfelt Journey. Working “on a scale I never even dreamt of before”, it took three and a half weeks to shoot the 30-second ad. “And on the day we wrapped, the disaster happened,” he reveals, referring to the explosion of a BP oil rig in May 2010, that led to a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. “At that point they were saying: ‘we’re going to sort it out, so carry on the project as planned. But by the time it was delivered it was: ‘we can’t plug this hole’.” The oil giant was certainly not inclined to release the ad at that point (although they have since, in a limited way).

Sad puppets and primal screams

Wilson reacted to that disappointment by throwing himself into a video for dubstep producer Skream’s Listenin’ to The Records on My Wall, in which he reinterpreted the story of Adam and Eve, using a combination of techniques – an ambitious video that he now describes as “a bit like having
a big, filmic primal scream.”

Then he moved on to making a pure, stream-of-consciousness, illustration-based animation, somewhat related in style to the Moray McLaren loops and also including a 2D precursor to the Maccabees ‘split-head’ idea – for UK dance outfit Japanese Popstars’ Let Go. Although the promo was very much an animation project, it turned out to be “a fresh start” after the BP and Skream projects. It was here Wilson met the illustrator and singer-songwriter Keaton Henson. “We had three weeks to do the video, so I only had time to do rough sketches and hand them on to someone else, and I’d been aware of Keaton’s artwork for a while. We called him, he really liked my Skream video, and said he’d do it.”

Some time later, Keaton handed Wilson a demo CD of his beautiful, deeply personal songs. “He told me he had storyboarded this idea for a video of a puppet that commits suicide.” This led to a directing collaboration, with Henson and his friend John Malcolm Moore, to make the video for Charon – in many ways a breakthrough video for Wilson as it’s not animated.

However, Wilson had already resolved to add a new dimension to his work before Charon. “I did two acting courses at The City Lit in London, to appreciate how it would feel to be in an actor’s position and to understand what to give them as a director.” One tutor, Peader Kirk, artistic director of the mkultra performance group, which specialises in improvisation, was particularly inspirational. “When he directed me I understood everything that he said, and I took a lot from it that I could transfer into my work.”

Tantalising Torquay

A few months later, Wilson was able to put into practice what he’d learnt when he directed his second Keaton Henson video, for Don’t Know How Lucky You Are. Henson came up with the image of a woman in Victorian dress in a barren landscape and asked his friend Sophie Thompson (sister of Emma) to be in it. “I thought this was great, because I’d never be able to work with an actress of this calibre any other way,” says Wilson. “And I needed some great hooks to get people involved, because the budget was so tight.”

The result is another remarkable video, a single, slow-moving shot of this woman quietly succumbing to total misery. “I considered so many variables, with Sophie rambling through the hills, and cut like a normal video, but none of that worked as well with the song. You just wanted to shoot that moment. But as soon as we were there on location, on Dartmoor, it seemed like the only possible thing to do.” And the final video is actually the first take.

Certainly by the time he made his second Keaton Henson video, Wilson had already wriggled out of the animation straitjacket by making his Metronomy video, The Bay. He had heard the band’s frontman Joe Mount saying how the band’s new album, The English Riviera, was a love letter to his hometown of Torquay, comparing it to Southern California in the 1960s, and to its more famous French equivalent. “I’d always loved Elton John’s I’m Still Standing video,” he reveals. “So I put it in the treatment, saying ‘wouldn’t it be great to do that, but with you instead of Elton John, and Torquay instead of Cannes.” Wilson also added a not entirely serious comment about calling the English Riviera Tourism Company to get their help, particularly with helicopter shots.

In fact, Colonel Blimp did exactly that, engaging the English Riviera Tourism Company’s help in securing free locations, accommodation and sharing the cost of a helicopter. As a result, The Bay is a combination of girls, sun, cars, and superb, sweeping aerial shots over Torquay’s coastline that make it look like the other Riviera. “With pretty much every shot I was thinking ‘I kind of don’t believe we’re doing this’.”

In a Barbie world

Wilson says that he approaches every project as if he’s on a learning curve. “Ever since university I’ve kept treating jobs as if they’re university briefs, which means you constantly experiment… I try to scare myself as much as possible on every project...”

It’s nice to keep that spirit of experimentation while nailing the occasional well-paid job too – and his viral for Nokia N8’s girly Pink edition earlier last year, out of Weiden + Kennedy, allowed great creative freedom. UK girl group Sugababes provided the soundtrack, but the stars were Barbie-style dolls, glammed up by stylists to the stars such as Anna Trevelyan (Jessie J’s stylist) and Charlie Le Mindu (hair designer for Lady Gaga). “It was like having your dream promo for a pop artist, but no egos. It also meant that when I wanted to have a multiple TV screen as tall as a skyscraper, it was fine as it meant building something doll-sized. We had a lot of fun with it.”

His new commercial project is another beast entirely and it doesn’t involve directing at all, but curating an art project that will see a brand-sponsored sculpture appear in Dublin by the spring of this year.

He’s also just completed Titanium for David Guetta – a proper big-budget music video and also a departure of style. “If it was a different brief maybe I wouldn’t have written on it, but they said David Guetta wanted to do a drama. ‘He’s not going to be in it. You’ve got completely free rein’.” “When I knew I couldn’t treat it in a satirical way, I took the idea in the complete opposite direction. The undercurrent of the video is about not being understood by the world around you, something that teenagers can relate to, and teenagers are an important demographic for David Guetta. I felt it made more of an impact using this very fictional scenario.”

Experimentation is all

So, now the question is, can David Wilson’s body of work possibly be as eclectic and versatile in 2012, as it has been in previous years? He’s certainly not ready to compromise that spirit of experimentation, because he feels that his long-term strategy is already paying dividends. “I’m a big believer in having experiences doing these little jobs, or going and doing a VJ set because I know it all feeds together. And the more fun stuff I do, the more fun stuff I’ll get paid to do.”