I’ve been watching or playing the beautiful game for most of my life, so it’s rare when a moment makes me stop dead in my tracks and take notice. Hudson was one of those moments. I stumbled across Hudson on the internet and instantly became fascinated with his wizardry with the ball. At the time he was eight years old, but his relationship with the ball looked like someone who had been playing for twenty plus years. I clicked the old “Follow” button on Instagram and thought, “can’t wait to see this kid represent the USA in the future.”

When some coworkers started to plan for the launch of ROGUE FC, our soccer specific media production agency, we kicked around different project ideas. One of them was telling the story of Hudson Hogsett. I reached out, pitched the idea to Hudson’s parents, and three weeks later we were in Dallas.

When you first meet H you can’t help but notice how shy he is. He shook my hand with a nervous smile and said a very quiet, “Hi.” He tapped his dad and asked him a question that he wanted to ask us. “Why don’t you ask them yourself?” his dad asked. This was hardly the behavior I expected from someone who was an actual assassin on the pitch. 

After we got the cameras and the soccer balls rolling though, something switched inside Hudson and all of a sudden he wasn’t a nine year old little boy anymore, he became a professional who was striving for a dream that fueled him unlike anything I have ever seen before. Over the course of the days, weeks and months of our shoot with Hudson - we saw him laugh, we saw him cry, we saw him pull off things with a ball that I’ve only ever dreamed of. Working with a child talent was one of the bigger challenges in my career. We had to throw out and rewrite the story outline multiple times when our shot list got scrapped repeatedly. This project required a ton of flexibility and reimagination as we pivoted repeatedly to bring this story to life. 

I honestly couldn’t be more proud of the final result of this project. This was my first mini-doc I have gotten to work on and I also introduced some film photography into my workflow for the first time.

To be entrusted with the opportunity to tell the story of someone so talented, young, and passionate was a true honor. We premiered the video with Hudson’s family and friends a couple weeks before the official launch, and the response was truly touching. A massive thank you goes out to Hudson’s family for entrusting us with the story, the RFC guys - Jordan and Shane for their hard work on the project, and for the folks at @433 for collaborating with us to launch the piece.