Vancouver Sun

Canadian duo Happy with success

- PETER ROBB

When Pharrell Williams won the Grammy for best music video of 2014 for the song Happy, the connection to Eastern Ontario was mostly unknown.

But Kathleen Heffernan of Kingston and Mandi Gosling of Cornwall each played a significan­t part.

Heffernan, a 31- year- old graduate of Queen’s University, was the executive producer for the video, which became a global phenomenon last year and spawned dozens of imitators on YouTube. The video was directed by the film collective We Are From LA, of which Heffernan is a member. She was also nominated for a Grammy for another video, The Golden Age, by Wood Kid.

“It’s really exciting and you really know it’s a big deal when your parents and friends are really excited. This was the gold medal,” Heffernan says. “I was shaking when they announced the Grammy. In terms of the career, it’s nice to say that you have that. You never expect to win, so that’s very cool.”

Heffernan has worked with major music artists throughout her young career. Along with the singer-songwriter who goes by the stage name Pharrell, she’s worked on video projects with Arcade Fire and Lorde.

“The music video business is very collaborat­ive,” she says. “Working with Pharrell and his team was amazing. They are very creative and very down to earth.”

Gosling, 39, runs an entertainm­ent company with her brother, actor Ryan Gosling. She cast the film, in all booking 360 civilians and stars for this very complicate­d project. She’s now working on another project with Pharrell.

“I have been fascinated by just how music videos come together,” she says. “Today there are so many really talented directors who use music videos as an opportunit­y to explore a creative idea that they might not be able to do in a full feature film, or in an advertisin­g campaign.”

Big directors now want to do music videos or interestin­g commercial­s, Heffernan says, because they are fun, different and innovative.

In the case of Happy, the song alone was a massive hit around the world for Pharrell. To coincide with the release of the song, the website 24hoursofh­appy.com launched the world’s first 24-hour music video.

The idea for the 24-hour, interactiv­e video “was a big idea and we weren’t really sure how we were going to pull it off at first,” Heffernan says. But Pharrell gave it the green light. Then the issue became who would be in it.

“It was not a traditiona­l casting process,” Gosling says. “Because we needed a lot of people in such a short period of time, we kind of blasted it out there. We had people record themselves. And we told them ‘Do whatever you’re going to do.’

“In the end, we had a mixture of really talented dancers and we had total character types.” She says she went through at least 5,000 people before casting the final group.

“It’s easy in Los Angeles to find people who are 25, good looking and who want to be on camera,” Gosling says. “Finding people who are in their 60s and 70s, and when you call them and say to them ‘I don’t know if you dance, would you mind putting yourself on tape and dance to this song?’ — that’s not easy.”

Gosling even convinced her mother, Judy, who lives in the Los Angeles area, to give it a go.

“We initially started looking for all these sophistica­ted dancer types and we realized early on that if this was going to be a unique project, people would see themselves reflected in the video in all shapes and sizes.”

What the directors realized, Heffernan says, was that if the people who were in the video were clearly having fun, then the audience could identify with them and have fun with it too. There were no rehearsals — the segments were done in one take, with the camera rolling the entire time.

The video was shot in 11 days. Usually a music video takes one or two days. The future, Heffernan says, will continue to see innovative use of technology and concepts.

The long version features the song repeated many times with people of all ages, sizes and abilities dancing around Los Angeles to the music. Pharrell himself appears every hour on the hour.

There are several celebrity cameos in the video, including Kelly Osbourne, Magic Johnson, Sérgio Mendes, Jimmy Kimmel, Steve Carell, Jamie Foxx, Ana Ortiz and Jo-Jo.

A four- minute version was also released onto YouTube. It has had more than 585 million views.

The video spawned more than 1,500 covers on YouTube, including Italian grandmothe­rs and grandfathe­rs, people in the Philippine­s after a devastatin­g cyclone and some Iranian fans who were arrested after posting their tribute. They were later released (with conditions) after an interventi­on by the Iranian president, who tweeted “#Happiness is our people’s right. We shouldn’t be too hard on behaviours caused by joy.”

 ?? THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ?? In this image from a video posted to YouTube, people dance to Pharrell’s song Happy on a rooftop in Tehran, Iran. Police arrested six people. They were later released after the Iranian president intervened.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS In this image from a video posted to YouTube, people dance to Pharrell’s song Happy on a rooftop in Tehran, Iran. Police arrested six people. They were later released after the Iranian president intervened.
 ?? JOEL RYAN/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ?? Pharrell presented Happy as a unique 24-hour music video.
JOEL RYAN/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Pharrell presented Happy as a unique 24-hour music video.

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