David Wilson: Lickety Split

17th February 2012

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 in his full interview taken from the latest issue of shots.

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.

Subscribers to shots can read the full interview here and in the new issue of shots magazine.