If there’s one thing you can say about Tom Emmerson, it’s that he isn’t afraid of working things out as he goes along. The self-taught photographer and director’s quietly confident approach to developing his practice saw him shoot campaigns for the likes of Burberry and Helmut Lang before the age of 18, while his first official directing gig came during his first year of uni, when he shot a music video for rising star Mimi Webb.

Emmerson’s journey into the creative industries began as a teenager, when he started taking photos of his friends, mostly skateboarding or just hanging out, and posting them on Instagram. “It was a smaller platform then, so you got a following more quickly. I was meeting a lot of people, because there’s a lot of overlap between skateboarding and fashion.”

By the time he was studying for his A-levels, he was regularly shooting editorials and campaigns after school or at the weekends, but even at that early point he recognised that photography probably wasn’t the right path for him. “It always felt quite unmeritocratic. It was very much based on who you knew, who you were mingling with. I just felt a bit disillusioned with the industry, so I thought, I’ll go do a normal job,” he says.

Having opted to study economics and business at UCL, Emmerson somewhat fell into the world of directing. “Through a funny, strange series of events, I convinced someone to let me do my first music video for Mimi Webb’s first single, Before I Go,” he says. “I was really lucky to have that opportunity to be in the right place at the right time, and have a reasonable budget and a lot of freedom for my first video. It kind of propelled me to get more opportunities of a similar scale.”

A dream of mine is to have my own ad agency and in-house production team – blanket creative freedom

Despite his early success, the director was acutely aware of how broken the music video model is compared with its MTV heyday. So rather than trying to get work through record labels and production companies, he decided to reach out to artists he admired directly. “My goal was to figure out a way to make music videos that felt true to my style,” he explains. “This way I could go make work, develop trust, and have time to work on different projects, as opposed to being forced to turn things around on such a tight brief, budget, and timeline.”

It was during this period that he met AntsLive, a north London rapper who was also starting to make a name for himself. After shooting their first music video together in 2021, Emmerson ended up becoming his manager, resulting in a series of highly creative promos that provided a welcome antidote to the sea of sameness in most rap videos.

The video that changed everything was Number One Candidate, a Sound of Music-inspired fever dream that sees AntsLive on a horse galloping through the Dolomite Alps (he learned to ride in just ten days ahead of making the video). Since its release earlier this year, the video has amassed over 1.4 million views on TikTok alone.

“I was relieved it got the success it did, because it’s the first time I’ve felt like if you really do make something good enough, it will get seen. I learned a huge amount about how to make something creatively exciting but that also has the potential to be commercially successful,” says Emmerson. The duo’s recent follow up, Captain Ants, is equally ambitious, with the rapper taking on the challenge of learning how to wing walk and salsa dance in order to pull it off.

While his ongoing collaboration with AntsLive has opened up new doors for Emmerson, he doesn’t believe he’d be able to make anything nearly as creative via the traditional record label route. “They would have thought I was nuts,” he says. “Even after making a video of that calibre, which broke an artist so to speak, labels still don’t want to operate in that way and so I don’t work with them. That’s not to say I don’t want to, I absolutely do … but I’ve got no interest in making mediocre work.”

What Number One Candidate did do, however, was pique the interest of Pulse Films, which signed the director earlier this year. So far, it’s led to a number of commercial opportunities, including his first TV ad for KFC. Unsurprisingly, he has big ambitions in the ad world, but these are tempered with an impressive understanding of an industry he’s only just started exploring. “A dream of mine is to have my own ad agency and in-house production team – blanket creative freedom where [clients] say, ‘What do you think we should do? Here’s a load money, go do it,’ and I go and do it,” he says.

“Do I think that will happen? Probably not, because I think there’s an inherent conflict between big companies and pushing the boat out creatively,” he continues. “Great ads do get made, but we’re not in a climate that’s conducive to taking risks, and I think that’s something that limits what’s possible.”

Emmerson’s ultimate dream is to write and direct his own features, although he recognises there’s a long road ahead to making one in the first place, let alone becoming an established name. As recent success stories such as the Daniels (the Oscar-winning director duo behind Everything, Everywhere, All At Once) have shown, music videos and ads can be a brilliant stepping stone into filmmaking, but they will only get you so far.

“Writing a good feature is a different thing to making a good music video or a good advert,” he says. “It’s much easier to fight for attention spans at that level than it is for 90 minutes, but I’m learning a lot. I like making good music videos, I like making good ads. It’s part of the journey to a place, but it’s also an enjoyable journey, and I’m getting a lot out of it.”

tomemmerson.com