OneInThree are Ross Cooper and Bugsy Riverbank Steel who, in their year together as a directing team, have made videos which amply demonstrate their ease with the medium in spite of some negligible budgets.

Their video for I Was A Cub Scout's Pink Squares, for example, placed a huge variety of coloured cardboard stencils between the camera and the performing band: ultra-cheap but highly watchable. The Bishops' Breakaway is a storming performance with a stunning use of black and white outfits and backdrops.

Now they have grabbed an opportunity to apply their visual ideas on a larger scale for Badly Drawn Boy's single Promises, which proved to be a case of creating something that suited the sensitive song with appropriately improved production values.

BDB's Damon Gough is playing piano in a darkened room intermittently lit by just one small lamp with chintzy lampshade. As the arrangement grows so does the illumination, via more lamps in the room, of every size and description – domestic, industrial, traditional and modern – tall lamps, downlights, strings of LEDs, even a street light –The studio space is revealed to be packed with lights, throbbing and glowing to the music – including the headlamps of the Triumph car used in the Dougal Wilson's BDB video for Nothing's Going To Change Your Mind.

“The track structure really worked for this approach - a single piano to full band,” says Cooper. “And Bugsy did this lovely drawing of this orchestra of lights for the treatment which Katie [Griffiths, Badly Drawn Boy's commissioner at EMI] really loved.”

“There were 250 practicals and a whole bunch of film lights,” reveals Cooper. “Our art director James Hatt did a great job hunting down lights from everywhere, then Bugsy asked a bunch of independent designers if they wanted some product placement.” These include the six-foot anglepoise designed by Anglepoise, and Asteroid, a blown glass floor lamp by Koray Ozgan.

Firstly, there was the huge task of programming all the lights for performance, then on the shoot day the filming didn't actually start until late afternoon. “It literally took that long to plug in all the lights!” explains Steel. “But it was a nice thing to look at when it was done. It got a round of applause even before we shot anything.”

This was their first outing shooting on 35mm (shot by Ed Wild) and they were not only delighted by the look but Gough's understated performance. “It's an emotional song, and we were worried he'd want a more emotional performance,” says Steel. But he told the directors that the concept held a special resonance for him. “It turns out that a while ago when Badly Drawn Boy were touring each band member used to have their own lights. We had no idea.”