We're ticking off the days until the MMVAs by profiling 2010's Video of the Year nominees.

The Video: “Perfect,” Hedley

When not pouring out his feelings on the piano in rock ballad form, Hedley’s Jacob Hoggard reflects on a bad break-up (or alternatively, the most disastrous birthday party in history) in slick, tableau-form.

Director: Kyle Davison

Notable Credits:

"Where Have All the Good People Gone," Sam Roberts

"Maniac," Girlicious

"Shake Tramp," Marianas Trench

The video he wishes he directed: “Telephone,” Lady Gaga (dir. Jonas Akerlund)

“Dance videos can certainly be a little ‘We’ve seen it, bored of it,’ but he did such a great job,” director Kyle Davison says in praise of Akerlund’s Gaga/Beyonce mini-movie. “Talent plus budget: you can really do some fantastic things, and I think they did.”

Where the Concept Came From:

Davison’s relationship with Hedley dates back a few years (he also directed the B.C. band’s 2005 video for “Trip”), and when Hedley’s Jacob Hoggard and Dave Rosin were in Toronto a few months back, they all met up for drinks and one thing led to another. “I came up with this idea that they trusted in because – I think some of the ideas they were getting were pretty straightforward,” Davison explains.

As for the idea he pitched them, “the treatment for the video is pretty much exactly what we shot,” he says. Basically, the theme of the video is “a relationship at the beginning of the end.”

“The song is just so Jake-centric,” says Davison, “that my idea was just to focus on him instead of having that standard band performance – even though we have them in there a little at the end.”

The video incorporates several tableaux – most focusing on singer Hoggard and a woman playing his partner (Neelam Khabra). Each scene “relates to a portion of a relationship and how it breaks down,” Davison explains: the scene where Hoggard carries her out of a burning room “could symbolize trying to save the relationship”; at a different point in the video, she’s seen unconscious, flopped over a piano in a burned-out building to represent “the relationship is left for dead.” One of the video’s most indelible images – a stream of red paint thrown on Hoggard in extreme slow motion – “could symbolize the anger,” Davison says.

According to the director, Hoggard freely shared his ideas while they were planning the video. “He actually came up with incorporating the fire, so there’s some fire that would symbolize the demise of the relationship or the relationship burning away,” says Davison. “He certainly does have a lot of ideas and that was a good one.”

The Moment to Watch For:

Several scenes in the video were shot in extreme slow motion – “like 1,000 frames per second stuff; normal motion picture is 24 frames,” Davison says for clarification. But the moment in the video when a bucket of red paint crawls across the screen to wrap itself around Hoggard – dressed all in white, in an all-white room – was a particular coup. More on that below…

Biggest Challenge:

The scene mentioned above was a veritable Katamari ball of insane challenges. First of all, a slow-mo shot of its kind requires a camera to zip by at high speed. We may see a 30-second shot in the final product, but the camera has to catch it all in under two seconds, which requires special equipment. “We didn’t have the money to do it, so we had to come up with a system to whip the camera across 20 feet in a second and a half. That was the hardest technical part of it,” says Davison, who thankfully had some crew members willing to build “a poor man’s solution.”

Second of all, there’s the little matter of using real red paint on an all-white set – a set that they kind of needed for a handful of other shots. Davison shot around that problem, saving the paint scene for later in the 19-hour shoot, but there are other things he had to factor in. “I remember that I wanted them in all white, and there was only one pair of white skinny jeans in the whole city,” he says. “So we didn’t even have a reset for the pants, let alone the room.”

“We really did have one chance. And who could have ever known it would come out of the bucket so perfectly like that and wrap around his face.”

Biggest Splurge:

The baby grand piano – though technically it was really the biggest potential splurge. The piano was on loan, and came to the Vancouver set with some strict instructions. “I think the rules were ‘You can use this piano, but if you wreck it you owe 25 grand,’” says Davison. “We did not wreck it, but I think we had a P.A. on Don’t Wreck the Piano Patrol. We were moving it around, it was getting blown with debris, there’s people laying all over it. I think that could’ve been the biggest splurge.”

The 2010 MMVAs are broadcast Sunday, June 20 on MuchMusic.

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