David Wilson’s appearance at last month’s Offf festival broke a number of taboos. He first made the audience sit up with the screening of his film Deep Clean – a very funny and extremely NSFW short which initially riffs on Queen’s famed I Want to Break Free video before going, well, much deeper.

This was shown on the main stage at Disseny Hub in Barcelona but also on massive screens outside for passers-by to witness too, much to Wilson’s delight. “I was amazed and overjoyed that they put it on those big screens outside – this is 8pm and you’re showing anal penetration to the public, amazing!”

What came next then broke with all the conventions we expect from a design or moving image festival, as Wilson went on to perform Closet, a half hour-long cabaret-cum-VJ set featuring dancers Wet Mess, Pinto, and Óscar del Pozo. Wilson himself was also centre stage, dressed in a range of outfits including a bright pink inflatable suit matched with gravity defying heels. A standard design talk this was not.

The cabaret show had in fact evolved via a number of appearances at the Playgrounds festival, where Wilson first appeared on a music video panel before creating club visuals and then developing his first ‘party’, which featured him performing to a backdrop of his music videos and other visuals.

He cites the encouragement of Playgrounds – who later provided a budget which allowed him to develop the project into a fully-fledged show – as giving him the confidence to pull it all together. “I’m not a professional DJ. I’m not a professional VJ. I did not know about programming software, but I knew enough to be like ‘maybe I can botch this together’,” he says. “You need to have someone to encourage you to go to that place.”

This all might seem quite a long way from Wilson’s early roots in illustration, which he studied at the University of Brighton. He quickly began making his drawings move, developing a distinctive style of animation that he later mixed with live action in a series of music videos for bands including Arctic Monkeys, David Guetta, Metronomy, Tame Impala, Arcade Fire and in a new video out last week, Mabel. He has also made commercials for brands from Ikea to Nike to DFS.

What unites all his work is a sense of exuberance, humour and usually joy. “This is what I do,” he says. “I wake up and go, ‘What’s going to be exciting? Oh, that would be stunningly beautiful. That would make me laugh, or what if we turned it on its head, people would gasp.’

“That’s really fun to play with. It’s infusing joy into my daily practice. It makes me excited to open my laptop or my sketchbook or go for a walk and make notes or listen to music. And then the projects that come in are infused with that joy also.”

As to performing himself, he points out that a core part of being a director is being able to put yourself out there, even behind-the-scenes. “I am comfortable in front of camera. There’s a whole performance that people don’t see because they only see the end result but I do a lot of video treatments, so I’m in presentations every day and doing the performance on Zoom. You know, not to the level of that [referring to the cabaret] but there’s a certain element of communication.”

Wilson is open about the challenges of treatments and pitching, admitting that only one in eight of his video pitches get picked up. This is indicative of the competitive nature of the industry, but also of the changing nature of music videos, where budgets are ever-more limited.

He also points out how the industry is a bit like fashion. “From my understanding, it’s an industry that runs on fashion and what’s the ‘hot new thing’. I managed to do a good run for ten years. But then I feel like there’s this period of time, that I hope I pass through, where people go, ‘Oh, well, he’s a bit 2010 and we’re 2024 now’. They want a fresh new thing, which is fine. But recently, music video work has picked up – I just got commissioned to do two more pieces. So yeah, it comes back round again.”

Formats are also changing, for both music videos and commercials, with social media encouraging shorter form approaches. Wilson is not against these developments, pointing out that he’s enjoyed seeing some of the more experimental ways that albums are being marketed on social with very short clips.

“I don’t feel precious about wanting to be doing the six-minute music video or nothing,” he says. “I’m very excited to work with shaping what that moving visual communication is for an artist, whichever shape that takes.

“I’m a director that likes to form relationships and work closely with the band,” he continues. “That’s part of my job satisfaction. It’s like ‘you’re this amazing, high functioning creative person, there’s a flow of your work out into the world. I’m connecting to it and other people are connecting to it.’ Of course, I want to engage with you and hang around with you, and chat during lunch breaks – not in an overpowering way but just so I can understand what’s going on because I can communicate better like that – it’s a collaboration and it’s fun.”

Commercials are a different kind of creative challenge, as with bigger budgets comes more pressure and a much wider selection of people invested in the project. “I love the dance of the commercials, I love the interplay of understanding what everyone needs,” Wilson says. “There’s so many other layers going on in commercials that I actually quite enjoy that go beyond the creative.”

As to what he prefers to work on, it’s not so much the style of project so much as the “energy” it will take to complete. “I get pleasure in all of it but I am wary of the energy that goes into whatever work I do,” he explains. “So a big project with a lot of pressure, whether that’s an ad or a music video – but it predominantly comes with adverts – because it’s the money, it’s the anxiety, it’s the clients, it’s a lot.

“When that energy topples and goes in a bad direction, it can wipe you out. I have been in situations where it’s wiped me out for months. And actually I’ve had that from music videos too. So it’s just being wary of that.”

For this reason, the idea of creating a feature film – often seen as the holy grail for all directors, and thus something Wilson has been asked about throughout his career – has never particularly appealed to him. Instead, he finds that the shorter format suits him and that it often offers a freedom that a feature might not.

“I love the short journey, I love that I’ve been fortunate enough to express myself to a level where I can really feel like I have ownership of the work that I put out there, especially in music videos. I’m standing there on stage going ‘this is me’, and I can honestly say that with the work … that’s really wonderful.”

There is also a definite sense of ‘watch this space’ with Wilson’s forays into cabaret and performance, which seem the perfect vessel to showcase all aspects of his output. He is clearly excited by the potential it offers, with more ‘parties’ planned soon.

“You can do whatever you want to do – even if it doesn’t exist,” he says. “Especially if it doesn’t exist. This kind of show did not exist at a motion graphics festival – and now it does because it just naturally evolved. So I’m very excited to pursue this and see where that takes us.”

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