Richard Heslop
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Richard Heslop is a British director of music videos and films. He has produced videos for artists including Queen and New Order, as well as programs on Channel 4 and the BBC.
[edit] Biography
Before becoming a director, Heslop operated a live multi-projection for 23 Skidoo on their travels through Europe in 1979. In 1981 he documented the Brixton riots and began a foundation course at the London College of Printing. There, he released his 7 Songs video (1983). He graduated in 1984 from St. Martins with a BA and honours with the degree-film (in cooperation with Daniel Landin) The Child and the Saw:. In the film, a nine year old girl receives a giant bandsaw for her birthday and plays innocently and gleefully as it twists around her bedroom. The film won first prize at the Spanish short film festival.
Heslop became known for his manipulation of film speeds that gave his images an alternative edge and unique feel and an alternate perspective of reality. In 1984, he was camera operator for Derek Jarman's experimental film Imagining October, filmed on super 8 mm. Two years later he directed his first music video The Queen is Dead by The Smiths and modeled in a Paris fashion show for Yohji Yamamoto. In 1986 he made the film Procar (16 mm, black and white, 19 mins.) in collaboration with Daniel Landin and Herbert Verhey with his Car Ensemble of the Netherlands ("Nederlands Auto Ensemble") for live performances in Amsterdam during the Romantic Aesthetics Festival. For this project, a two-day drive-in cinema was built in the centre of the city. The film was shown later that year at the Berlin Film Festival. The same year, he filmed with Daniel Landin the performance of Laibach and Michael Clark in London: No Fire Escape In Hell (1986) and filmed on locations in Slovenia the music video for Laibach's Life is Life (16 mm, released in 1987).
In the late nineteen-eighties he started to create photo-montages that were exhibited in The London Gallery. He also continued his career as director of music videos, including clips for New Order, Pop Will Eat Itself and The Mighty Lemon Drops. During the same period he started Trigger Happy Films (that would produce the video for Unbelievable by EMF) and apart from beginning to document the rave scene in England he became cameraman on Derek Jarman's arthouse feature film The Garden (1990). For Channel 4, he directed in 1991 Floating, a 39 min. movie about a Docklands bus driver on the verge of a nervous breakdown, starting to have visions of a second "Great Flood" who finally destroys his house in order to build an ark. This film was chosen in 1992 as the best short film in the Semaine de la Critique at the Cannes Film Festival.
Richard Heslop joined Oil Factory Films the same year, a London-based production company for music videos and commercials. In 1997 he directed of the music video "I Was Born to Love You" by Queen. After having directed dozens of music videos, he left Oil Factory Films and began to produce and direct films for the BBC and Channel 4, as well as TV series such as Residents, a black comedy, as an 8 x 30 min. part TV series (2000) and State of the Party, a contemporary drama set in and about the dance culture scene, with music by Jamiroquai, Air and Neneh Cherry.
