Behind the scenes of Halifax-based indie film Heartbeat

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Halifax's Andrea Dorfman's melodic indie-film Heartbeat not only stars singer-songwriter Tanya Davis as a young woman attempting to overcome stage fright to become a musician, it also stars Halifax (as itself, in a breakthrough performance!). We spoke with production designer Kevin Lewis about the look of the film and the city.

On what a production designer does: In a small film like Heartbeat, a production designer becomes the whole art department, though I did work very closely with the director Andrea Dorfman, who has a strong sense of style herself. But basically we take care of the look of the film. For example, we accentuate the characters' personalities through textures and colours. We had a theme running through Heartbeat. We started off with a blue, when the main character is fighting herself. As she finds herself she gets brighter, right up to the reds. She's becoming more herself, which is vibrant and outgoing.

On choosing just the right house for filming: The main character is living in the house that used to be her grandmother's. She kept the house he way it was, in order to keep her grandmother around, in a sense. So, we were looking for a dated look. The bungalow we found was a neutral green, unchanged from the 1970s. The character was living in someone else's house. It's not her own. In the same way, she's living somebody else's life. We added tea cups and crocheted things, to accentuate what the house already had. We were looking for something very specific and it took us a long time for one of the location scouts to find it.

On Halifax playing itself: In the films we shoot here in Halifax, we tend to hide the fact that we're in Halifax. It often plays Maine or Boston. But with Heartbeat, we didn't cover things up. The Citadel is a hill in the centre of the city, and it's a big part of the film. It's an an iconic image and we didn't shoot it from an angle trying to show it off as something else. We also shot in a bar called the Company House and that's the name we used in the film. So, we shot Halifax as Halifax.