DANCING TO THE ANIMATED BEAT OF PIECE BY PIECE

By TREVOR HOGG

Images courtesy of Focus Features.

Producer/director/writer Morgan Neville has become known for his musician profiles, whether highlighting backup singers in 20 Feet from Stardom or sitting down with a legendary rock guitarist in Keith Richards: Under the Influence. What is different with Piece by Piece is that the life and career of Pharrell Williams is depicted not through the traditional documentary means of talking heads and archival footage but instead as a LEGO animated feature. Two versions were made of the documentary, with the more traditional approach used as a rough template for its animated counterpart.

“For a long time, documentaries were seen as just journalism with pictures. There have been people over the decades who have pushed that, such as Erroll Morris, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders. The audience is ready and hungry for it. When I get asked, ‘Is your film a documentary?’ I say, ‘It’s creative nonfiction.’ A documentary comes with a rulebook, and Piece by Piece is deeply faithful and truthful, but is it pure journalism? No. However, that’s not what I tried to do. It’s cinema first. That kind of liberation is good for filmmakers and audiences.”

—Morgan Neville, Producer/Director/Writer

“It had some original and archive footage, music videos, other movie clips and some drawings to get the story in place as much as we could before we took it into animation,” Neville states. “I remember it being complicated. If you’re basing something on a photo, do you need to license it? There is stuff like the Oprah footage, which we licensed and then basically animated it one-to-one with what the original scene is, if you look at it side by side with his performance on that show. That is maybe 25% to 30% of the film.” Licensing footage was worth the cost. “Making an animated film on a smaller budget, those sequences were gifts because even though they were going to cost as much as something we had made up, we didn’t have the time to make it up,” remarks Animation Director Howard Baker. “We still storyboarded it so that the animation studios could start breaking down the scene down. If it was live-action, their heads would have exploded!”

Pivotal in visually translating Williams’ creative process was his condition called Chromesthesia or sound-to-color synesthesia where sounds appear as colors. “Synesthesia was the one thing that unlocks this fantasy gear and was perfect for animation,” Neville believes. “That scene worked so well that when we showed it to people they said, ‘I want to see that movie.’” Given a visual representation are the catchy musical beats that are the foundation of the Williams’ songs. “I had three people who I worked quite closely throughout the show, and we felt that the film needed a LEGO hook,” Baker recalls. “We always had big bowls of LEGO and LEGO toys in our story room and were playing around with them. We started making these things saying, ‘This is like this or that sound.’ We made a whole bunch of them, and our producers in India created them in CG. We sent them over to Pharrell’s company, i am Other, and they had ideas and reasons why things didn’t work. Each beat ended up having a specific personality.”

Interviews rather than scripted dialogue drive the narrative. “Whenever I was doing interviews, I would ask, ‘What did the room look like? What did you and they say?’” Neville explains. “In the case of Pharrell’s grandmother, she is gone, so he got his aunt to do the voice, but we didn’t script anything. Even the banter between Pharrell and Snoop Dogg came from a podcast they had done together, and suddenly you can transform that anywhere, like backstage at the concert. There was that playfulness of being in moments more rather than just narrate something with pictures. We could time travel in a way through the film, which you can’t do in documentaries but easily can do in animation.”

Some of interviewees were a nature fit while others required editorial assistance when it came to timing. “When N.O.R.E. and Gwen Stefani were talking to Morgan, they were already animated and quite over the top, so using their interview as actual dialogue felt natural,” Baker notes. “But then Teddy Riley didn’t seem quite as natural; his acting felt like it might turn out to be stiff; however, it ends up becoming the character.” The director is part of the cast. “My mini-me is the prefect pasty, disheveled, bespectacled documentary filmmaker that I am!” Morgan laughs. “My hair has gotten much whiter than it was at the time.” Everyone had opinions about the design of their LEGO persona to varying degrees. “Because Pharrell was such a main character, it took a long time for us to get there,” Baker states. “Missy Elliott was involved in the design of her character, which is one of the most successful because she was in there pointing out things to do to make her feel comfortable. No Doubt was easy about their caricatures; they saw one version, gave some notes, and that was that.”

“[W]e didn’t script anything. Even the banter between Pharrell and Snoop Dogg came from a podcast they had done together, and suddenly you can transform that anywhere, like backstage at the concert. There was that playfulness of being in moments more rather than just narrate something with pictures. We could time travel in a way through the film, which you can’t do in documentaries but easily can do in animation.”

—Morgan Neville, Producer/Director/Writer

A conscious decision was made not to have a production designer developing a unifying look. “I wanted all the different designers to bring what they thought it should look like into the picture so all of these places end up having a natural personality that was different,” remarks Baker, who was based at Pure Imagination Studios. Set and environmental designs were divided between Tongal and Zebu Animation Studios. Zebu Animation Studios and CDW Studios each did one-third of the animation, and the remainder was completed by animators hired by Pure Imagination Studios, who were already proficient in the LEGO stop-motion animation style. “There were definitely studios we knew were better at certain things,” Neville observes. “ModelFarm was good at water, and the water effects are amazing. There were definitely animators who were good at base animation, and we gave them the close-up scenes.”

Unlike animation, where everything is created from scratch, documentaries need to adapt to real settings and circumstances. “We did a lot of things that were common in documentaries that are uncommon in animation, like montaging through space and time,” Neville states. “My sense is that the big LEGO movies have some giant incredible anchor sets that they live in a lot, and we were constantly skipping through space and time from location to location. The number of sets we had would dwarf what you would normally find in LEGO movie. In a way, it wasn’t about building all of these amazing castles. We just need to capture the essence of different places and times. Teddy’s studio, Virginia Beach and New York each have a feel.”

The aspect ratio was 2.39:1. “The film that I talked about the most in terms of the look was Moonlight because I love the cinematography, and it has this warm, funky anamorphic look,” Neville explains. “There was a unifying lens look throughout the whole film even though at times we break into these archival sections that actually have a different look. Some of the archival sections we exported from finished 4K animation onto VHS and re-imported it from VHS. I don’t know if that has ever been done before! In terms of framing, we did a lot of tights and mediums because that felt cinematic.”

“We felt that the film needed a LEGO hook. We always had big bowls of LEGO and LEGO toys in our story room and were playing around with them. We started making these things saying, ‘This is like this or that sound.’ We made a whole bunch of them, and our producers in India created them in CG. We sent them over to Pharrell’s company, i am Other, and they had ideas and reasons why things didn’t work. Each beat ended up having a specific personality.”

—Howard Baker, Animation Director

Early on, a topic of conversation was the limitations of LEGO animation. “A big one was dance,” Neville states. “LEGO figures don’t bend, and there is a lot of movement in the film. We had a lot of discussions about, ‘How do we represent dance as much as we can?’ Howard has a dance background and has played with this. Cracking that was a major thing for us.” A 24-hour-long video of Pharrell Williams’ hit “Happy” came in handy. “We watched that for many hours looking for a lot of dance references to put all over in the film,” Baker reveals. “I’m a big believer in if you can draw it, you can probably animate it. We would draw it out and show it to the animators, and sooner or later they would give us a version of it that felt right.”

Piece by Piece expands the boundaries of documentary filmmaking. “For a long time, documentaries were seen as just journalism with pictures,” Neville notes. “There have been people over the decades who have pushed that, such as Erroll Morris, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders. The audience is ready and hungry for it. When I get asked, ‘Is your film a documentary?’ I say, ‘It’s creative nonfiction.’ A documentary comes with a rulebook, and Piece by Piece is deeply faithful and truthful, but is it pure journalism? No. However, that’s not what I tried to do. It’s cinema first. That kind of liberation is good for filmmakers and audiences.”

The experience has been career-altering. “It’s to Pharrell’s credit for making this animated because animation is an emotional metaphor which allows us not be factual but at the same time make it believable,” Baker remarks. “You can have a singing mermaid and no one questions it. Making a story about a real person’s life, then making it as emotionally visual as we get to do in animation has opened my eyes to being able to get deeper into characters and letting them tell the story. There came a point where I realized that what we do with animation is so visual and what they do now in documentary and live-action is so character-driven that I was able to bring those two things together in way that is unique and mind-boggling eye-opening.”