Scott Lyon

Scott Lyon's come a long way from faffing around with light meters in French lavs. Tim Cumming meets the former 'stupid English boy' with a bunch of bright ideas whose gong-gathering promos and ads that dazzle with technical brilliance

Here's an idea: herding the world's biggest supermodels into a backstage pissoir during Paris Fashion Week to take their pictures perched on the john or draped over a men's urinal - on your very first job. It may be an unorthodox entry into the realm of professional creativity but it's surely been an effective one for Scott Lyon. "Singly the most nerve-wracking thing I've ever done," confirms the acclaimed music video and commercials director.

"We hadn't really any technical grasp - we only bought a light meter on the day we were commissioned, and learnt to use it on the Eurostar over." The toilet, it transpires, was the only place with enough light to shoot in. "After we'd done a few word got around to the others that it was quite a funny shoot with a stupid English boy taking them into toilets and everyone did it - Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Helena Christensen… I was 20." He grins. "It was absolutely terrifying - but it was a fast learning curve. You learn on the job extremely quickly."

Lyon hasn't stopped learning on the job as his career has progressed from stills to music videos to TV commercials. And he's reaped the awards in pretty well every discipline he's focused in on. That first pro fashion shoot came from a Vogue photography prize while studying graphic design at Central St Martins. His body of work in music videos won him a Best Director's gold at the 2006 Cads Music Vision Awards, and his audacious split-screen, high-profile spot for Honda, Everything, has just been nominated for a D&AD pencil.

Lyon, 35, studied foundation art in his native Huddersfield before moving to London and St Martins in 1997, and from the start, pursuing an idea to surprising new conclusions has been at the heart of his creative process. "You're not really tutored at St Martins," he explains, "but the one instruction you do get is that everything is about ideas - how your ideas can be different to other ideas. Rather than being completely technical, it was more about having the idea and achieving it."

Lyon continued with fashion spreads for three years before a stills shoot on a feature film led to a budget video for a fledgling Britpop band, The Peccadilloes. From that came an association with production company Hammer and Tongs, set up by three friends from St Martins.

"It was just a little office above a Chinese in Chinatown. Grant Gee was there, who made the Radiohead film, Meeting People Is Easy. It had a nice co-op vibe with everyone helping out on each other's jobs. For me that was the point where I realised it was more what I wanted to do than the stills and fashion stuff." The medium's challenges drew him like a spider to a fly.

"You're learning as you you're doing it, but with other people around you, you really learn quickly. And it had the same ethos as in St Martins, you're learning from other people but you also want to do better. There was a healthy sense of competition."

When Hammer and Tongs closed shop a year later, Lyon moved on to Oil Factory in America and Factory Films in the UK - with whom he still works -and set about creating visually innovative, multilayered videos for the likes of The Zutons, Franz Ferdinand, Mark Ronson and those arch rock n rollers, Kasabian. "They're really nice blokes, and they take it really seriously," he laughs. "They're into making videos. But yeah, they're full-on rock n roll guys, very different to a band like Franz Ferdinand."

The rigors of music video production often meant single-day, 20-hour shoots, fast turnarounds in the cutting room, and dealing with musicians who may be at home on stage, but were way out of their comfort zone in front of a focus puller and camera crew. "With videos you've always got the uncertainty of the band. You can plan how you're want to shoot it, but you can't plan what the band are going to do, what they're gonna be like on the day - what were they doing last night, are they still drunk? Will they puke up halfway through? You don't know."

The video industry has changed enormously since Lyon's entrée at the turn of the century. What was an average budget then - around £40,000 - is these days high-end promotion for a major band. With haemorrhaging profits in the wake of downloads, the first thing to go was the video budget. "It's bad in a lot of ways, but creatively, over the last couple of years I've seen a lot more interesting music videos being made." It's not so much that labels have begun chancing their budgets on unfamiliar names once more, but that with today's technology - providing high-quality end product without the need of a crew - they no longer pay for it. "People are doing it for virtually nothing, for the love it. Or they'll do something on spec. Or someone will make an interesting film that works really well as a music video. It's an exciting time for stuff like that. I think it'll eventually run into commercials as well."

At Factory, Lyon was directing a video a month for three years - a punishing work rate by any standards - before signing up with Outsider in 2007 and stepping into TV advertising with his first spot for Sunday Times Style, which showcased his multilayered method of choreographing an original soundtrack with strong visual motifs and taut editing. "I like trying to find different ways, different techniques of going through different scenes and still bring the narrative through."

His work reached pitch-perfect brilliance with Enjoy For Everyday, the VW spot he did with DDB London, which bagged a bronze at Cannes and a silver at the BTAA, and whose soundtrack was crafted with Orbital's Paul Hartnoll from incidental noises ranging from slamming car doors to engine acceleration to the passing commotions of a newspaper vendor and street busker.

"It was all done in camera, not in post," remembers Lyon. "We could've changed the music and put in any sound we wanted, but the agency were on side that we should do it all for real. In the end, hopefully, you can hear it was done for real. And it has a bigger impact on the viewer."

The methodology was typically hands-on. "When the guy driving the car accelerated and got to a certain point, we'd say, 'keep the car at that speed' because that was the pitch we needed. And passing things in the street we'd pick out certain repetitive rhythms - so we'd have all these musical phrases that, when we cut the film together, made the music."

Graeme Hall, CD on the VW spot, remembers Lyon as "one of the most adaptable directors I've worked with. He came to us before we went to him and he'd done a test that nailed it straight away. Because there was no story or dialogue you had to wing it. For most directors that would be terrifying - you're trying to create the structure of the ad almost by mistake as you shoot it. It was so technique-driven that if it went wrong it would go horribly, horribly wrong. And there are only a few directors who could actually pull that off."

Since then, Lyon has upped the ante with the multilayered shooting and editing on Honda's Everything for W+K London. Its shimmering choreography of split-screen images is locked in a dazzling visual rhyme scheme of cars, bikes, boats and riders, with each composite image-within-an-image split by a single-frame time-lag. "It was really detailed and a frustrating shoot at times," Lyon admits, "and a very tricky one technically, particularly in the edit."

For his forthcoming Ford spot, Lyon shot in wildly different weather conditions in Johannesburg and Iceland - where he and the crew were among the first to see the dust-and-sulphur plumes of the erupting Mt Eyjafjallajokull that closed Europe's airspace in April. "It has lots of visual moments that are edited together, that are match-cut," says Lyon, "so if someone pulls a hat off some one's head you cut to a cover being pulled off a car. There are lots of different actions, locations, and weather conditions. Good fun, lots to shoot." And, once again, long days in the edit - the 61 seconds of Honda ate up a mighty five weeks in the cutting room.

Despite the industry downturn, commercials continue to take up most of his working life and he's more than happy to stay put. "It feels the right place for me, because of that whole thing of being involved in the ideas, and realising those ideas. I didn't find I could fully do that in music videos."

And as a director who errs towards realism rather than the virtual trickery of post, how does he view the inexorable advance of 3D technology - through rose-tinted 3D glasses? "It's great, but I'm not sure about it being the new revolution. I can't imagine a Mike Leigh film in 3D, but there are some visual ideas you could really go to town on." You can almost see him salivating at the prospect. "3D ads are being made right now, and I can see myself working on one in a year's time. That will be a new frontier."