Director research task - Lindy Heyman

Lindy Heymann won 'Best Directorial Debut' at the the British Independent Film Awards with her first feature, which was Showboy. Not only does Heymann have a career in films, which has lead her to being nominated for the Michael Powell Award, for her second feature, Kicks, in 2009. Lindy was also nominated for the Best Newcomer  Award. Lindy Heymann also has had a prolific career in music videos. Heymann has directed over one hundred music videos. Her music video career has meant that Heymann has worked with artists such as Paul McCartney, John Lydon, Sinead O'Connor, David Gray, The Charlatans, Suede, Leftfield, Terry Hall and Faithless. 

Lindy Heymann - concept to consumption. 

Lindy Heymann was given a track to listen to and told it was a Mark Owen track, other than that she was not given much more information. From listening to the track she gained an understanding from the lyrics that it was the end of the world. Therefore she got the image of shooting the video in empty London, however to do this it would have been very expensive, and they did not have the money to do it. Lindy Heymann wrote her treatment and the video commissioner loved Heymann's idea for the track and asked her to come in for a meeting. At this meeting they discussed the  record label's concerns regarding Heymann's idea. The concerns that the record label had were that the video could be too dark, Mark Owen, how was former member of Take That is seen as 'the boy next door' and they wanted to keep the Take That fans onside. After this meeting Heymann met up with Mark Owen and they discussed the video. Mark Owen agreed with the ideas that Lindy had, and he said he wanted to do something different to Take That. However Mark Owen did have a concern,this concern was that the video wasn't dark enough, and he suggested that at the end of the music video there would be a shot of him dead. However, with the video commissioner in the meeting as well as Mark Owen, Lindy Heymann was in a situation where the artist wants to push them self, however the record label don't think it will work for the marketing, and want to the artist to maintain their image, in this case 'the boy next door' image. After this Heymann began to storyboard her idea, then began to film. Heymann already knew she would be using more than one camera unit. 

For example, for the shots of the skyline and the bird. Rather than having a large number or crew waiting for a small number of people to film a bird fly off and return, Heymann set off a small crew of people to film the skyline and the bird, this way other filming could take place at the same time, and the shooting would not be delayed. The video was shot within one small cross section, this meant that there was only one location change, this was to a bar. Altogether the crew spent 14 hours on the music video.