The Oscars have a protracted historical past with the musical biopic: Think about “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” “Bohemian Rhapsody” and even the much less easy Elton John movie “Rocketman.” These staples of awards seasons are ripe for a little bit of shaking up. Stepping in to do exactly which are two movies which have created one thing of a subgenre during which animation and visible results inject a brand new artistic spark into the all-too-familiar story of a musician’s rise from obscurity to fame.
“I loved his pitch, because it was so weird,” director Morgan Neville says of Pharrell Williams’ thought to do his biopic with Lego collectible figurines, like those of Daft Punk and Williams above.
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‘Piece by Piece’
In Morgan Neville’s well-received animated documentary “Piece by Piece,” audiences have interaction in a high-energy model of Pharrell Williams’ life and musical output — all instructed by the magic of Lego animation. Neville, who’s greatest identified for his Oscar-winning 2013 doc “20 Feet From Stardom” and this 12 months’s Emmy-nominated “Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces,” says he was excited when Pharrell urged they need to inform his life story by Lego mini-figurines.
“I first met Pharrell in early 2019, and he told me that he loved my films and could see me doing the documentary about him, but he wanted us to shoot everything, then throw everything out and do it all again in Lego animation,” Neville remembers. “I loved his pitch, because it was so weird. At the time, I didn’t know if it would work, but it just felt like a big swing. We had to figure out the rules of this film: How do you get Lego characters to dance? So we did a 90-second proof of concept with Tongal studio, and everyone who saw it wanted to see more. I know it could have died in so many ways, but it gave us a fresh, new way of treating his story.”
To assist understand Pharrell’s animated imaginative and prescient, Neville says he ended up making the movie twice. “Before doing the animation, we wrote the film, did the interviews and got the music footage and clips,” he remembers. “We were constantly iterating and soft-locked the movie before beginning the animation with Howard E. Baker and his team at Pure Imagination Studios,” who had labored on Lego variations of “Batman,” “Jurassic World” and “Minions.” “Howard and I worked side by side for a couple of years,” Neville says.
“What I learned is that documentarians and animators come from opposite extremes. Animators have so much control, and documentarians have so little,” Neville says. “We wanted to preserve the language of documentary in a way that’s very fresh for animation. That meant throwing in some of the staples of the genre, such as including rough, handheld shots or featuring a boom hanging in a shot — all in stylized [computer-generated] Lego animation.”
Animation allowed Neville and his crew to indicate what was taking place inside Pharrell’s artistic thoughts, in addition to offering a cinematic means for the musician and his associates to recall their life experiences. It allowed the filmmaker to time journey and be there when the songs have been being conceived. “It also gave us access to this fantasy gear that the music unlocks,” he provides. “That’s when it felt like we weren’t doing a documentary anymore, and anything was possible. One of the biggest joys I had in making the film was the fact that I could be inside some of the subjects’ heads as opposed to just filming their faces.”
Pop star Robbie Williams is depicted as a chimpanzee in “Better Man.”
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‘Better Man’
Author-director Michael Gracey makes use of a extra life like kind of animation to reimagine the life and instances of British pop star Robbie Williams in “Better Man.” The film, which shall be launched within the U.S. by Paramount on Dec. 25, depicts the previous member of the favored boy band Take That as a really expressive chimpanzee — due to motion-capture and CG work by Wētā FX.
The sweeping biopic charts the rise of the pop star, from his days as a cheeky 8-year-old in a working-class U.Okay. city to his battles with the standard pitfalls of fame and cash. The key conceit of the film got here from Gracey, a visible results supervisor earlier than he directed Hugh Jackman in 2017’s “The Greatest Showman.” “Robbie has all these great stories about his life, and I told him that he should record them before he forgets all of them,” the director remembers. “He has a recording studio in his home in Los Angeles, so during the course of a year and a half, I visited him and recorded these stories, which served as the first draft of the movie.”
Later, Gracey would hearken to the recordings and shut his eyes and picture the narrative taking part in out. “The idea of imagining Rob as a monkey was born out of me trying to come at the story from a different creative perspective,” he says. “We’ve recently had a bunch of musical biopics, and some people feel there’s a bit of fatigue in the genre because of the very familiar nature of the story. For me, what was unique about Rob’s story was the idea of a son realizing his father’s dreams, which is incredibly relatable. I heard him refer to himself as a monkey who performed to please his dad. That’s when I thought it would be great to lens this narrative through his point of view instead.”
The director believes that the viewers routinely develops extra empathy for Williams as a monkey. “When we watch animals in pain, our hearts go out to them immediately,” he notes. “As we were portraying Rob’s mental health issues, it allowed for a way of showing his self-loathing, and we were able to show him being judged by different versions of himself out in the crowd.”
Gracey praises Wētā visible results supervisor Luke Millar, animation supervisor Dave Clayton and VFX producer Andy Taylor for his or her exact, lovely work. “They created an amazingly detailed, high-res scan of Robbie’s eyes, and blended that with the performance of actor Jonno Davies. You can still recognize Robbie’s eyes in the monkey’s face. It’s incredible to be looking at the digital animal and seeing so much humanity reflected in that face.”
In line with the director, Williams was a bit speechless when he first noticed the ultimate minimize of the film. “It wasn’t until the third time we watched it together that he could really engage with it,” says Gracey. “It must be very strange to watch your life play out in front of you, but it must be even more surreal to have you played by a monkey! There are not many stars on the planet who would agree to be seen in such a raw way.”