UK pop band Lawson team up with Nick Bartleet for this slick, hi-tech promo to new single Standing In The Dark. With the band performing in a large, minimal and daunting space and a night-time cityscape acting as a very effective backdrop, Nick had this to say about the production:

"Having devoted a lot of this year to a new venture of mine, Furnace, where we have been busy making armour and props for several Hollywood features, I was excited about the possibility of shooting a music video with a grand sense of scale and that incorporated a lot of different skills and processes.

"I pitched what was quite an abstract idea to the band and fortunately they loved it. The idea works within a large penthouse set we built from scratch. The set was designed to feel cold, baron and masculine so that Andy would feel isolated for his performance.

"I was inspired by a ceiling design at the London Aquatics Centre and I'm always a big fan of building lighting grids into the set where possible. The ceiling consisted of over 100 1kw par cans, each controllable individually so that we could sequence the light panels, quickly creating very different looks for the two separate scenes in the video. I designed a complex rain water delivery system which was made from hundreds of meters of pipe, with thousands of tiny holes to create an even distribution of water over the entire space. These pipes were then dressed into the set so that we could have full 360 degree shooting without any ugly SFX hoses in sight.

"Finally we had a 5m wide x 20m long backdrop, custom printed to form the skyline. I was fortunate enough to have my good friend and long-standing DOP Eric Maddison, fly over from LA to help me with what was a pretty epic undertaking. We managed to squeeze an incredible Louma 2 telescopic crane out of the budget allowing us to stay on the remote head all day and put the camera wherever we wanted, quickly.

"Although we shot on my favourite format, anamorphic, predominantly because it worked so well with the design and aspect ratio of the set, Eric and I both agreed from the outset that we would avoid at all costs any tacky anamorphic lens flares and try to keep the focus on the design, lighting and camera work. Final 3D VFX by a friend of mine, Joseph Harford at shineLabs and our own in house edit, grade and compositing polished the video for delivery".

http://www.youtube.com/watchv=PsbPkZPKEuY