Time machines and teleportation, the stuff of fluro 80s sci-fi films and TV shows, gets re-imagined in Oscar Hudson and Spike Morris’ film This Way Up, screened as part of Channel 4’s Random Acts series.
Every now and then on Channel 4, sometimes before the news, you catch a Random Acts film, a specially commissioned 3-minute short about art, music, charity, personal experience… whatever. They always make you stop and think, and wonder why all films aren’t three minutes. i‑D filmmaker Oscar Hudson filled one such slot with his film This Way Up last November. The film follows a dancer as he teleports around the world in a cardboard box, looking for space to move. We asked Oscar to talk through the creation process, which involved lots of equipment, a tiny car and Swizz mountain lakes…
From Oscar…
The concept for this video spiralled out of control pretty quickly. What was originally imagined as a one day shoot with Shun (our talented dancer) in a London warehouse very rapidly became four guys cramming into a tiny car, wedged in tight with camera gear and huge cardboard boxes (no room for luggage), driving full-pelt around Europe for a week. We ended up travelling the entire perimeter of France, dipping into the deserts of northern Spain and stopping off at the mountainside lakes of Switzerland too. We saw some beautiful, beautiful places; only a fraction of which made it into the final edit.
From a filmmaker’s perspective, there’s something strangely satisfying in the contradiction between the film’s on-screen concept of instant teleportation and the reality of the sometimes intense tedium that driving incredible distances in a stuffy, over-packed car entails. A lot of people asked me if we’d used green screen for our locations, which I take as a compliment, but I’ve always been more interested in the idea of doing things the hard way. I really think that when you put real labour into a film it will always show through. I’d take an eight-hour drive over a green screen any day!
Me and Spike have just got back from Morocco shooting our second film for the ‘Random Acts’ series and have a third in production as well so watch this space!
Introduction: Sarah Raphael
Body Text: Oscar Hudson
Film: Oscar Hudson and Spike Morris
