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“If you want to look at Ron and Russell, you have to look at them through one prism. And that prism is cinema,” says Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos, one of the contributors to the new documentary about The Sparks Brothers.
Director Edgar Wright's debut feature doc captures the
art-pop pioneers at an improbable late career high, as well as recounting the
story of how they got there, asking why they aren't as celebrated as they
deserve to be, and finding out how they became your favorite band's favorite
band.
Their eclectic body of work spanning 25 albums and five
decades is, among other things, inherently cinematic. The Maels, who began
making music while studying film at UCLA under the influence of Ingmar Bergman
and the Nouvelle Vague, create songs that present themselves as a three-minute
elevator pitch for a romantic drama or a black comedy. They often use such
meta-narrative cinematic techniques such as whipping away the wizard's curtain
and breaking the fourth wall.
In the film’s production notes Ron Mael compares their
fractured sense of narrative to walking in halfway through a film, and figuring
out what's going on (something he and Russell frequently did as children). They
are also, literally, filmmakers, albeit perennially-thwarted ones: projects
with Jacques Tati and Tim Burton didn't make it to screen (though Annette,
a collaboration with Leos Carax, is currently awaiting release).
The Sparks Brothers documentary is as
genre-promiscuous as Sparks' discography itself, using Wright's trademark
superfast edits and several styles of animation to push things along, as well
as the more traditional use of archive clips and talking heads.
Wright personally conducted over 12 hours of interviews with
Ron and Russell over two years as well as interviewing numerous Sparks admirers
and collaborators such as Beck, Bjork, Steve Jones of Sex Pistols, Flea from
the Chili Peppers, Mike Myers and Giorgio Moroder.
There was also the challenge of finding archival footage,
some of which had never been seen before.
They began with over 6,000 separate archival assets which included
hundreds of full performances, boxes of personal photos, contact sheets, and 345
songs.
To bridge sections as well as illustrate anecdotes and add
visual grace notes, Wright enlisted the help of animators Joseph Wallace and
Greg McLeod.
“I always had the idea that because the brothers are so
filmic, and interested in film, additional animation and visual non-sequiturs
would be perfect,” says Wright. “I never directed a Sparks video, but I wanted
to have imagery in it that would be worthy of one of their videos.”
Editor Paul Trewartha was tasked with shaping and condensing
the material.
“We were working with countless formats, aspect ratios and
frame rates that we were constantly interpreting as frame for frame in the
project window to remove blending at every opportunity,” Trewartha tells Adobe. “My incredible assistant, Andy Laas, then reproduced this interpretation with
the hi-res material after lock and completed the full conform in Premiere Pro,
eye matching over 2,000 separate cuts of archive alone before feeding these mix
downs out with associated XMLs to the grade. It was a lot of work, but allowed
us to troubleshoot in a controlled environment before feeding it out.”
Trewartha also animated billposters, flyers and album covers
in After Effects and manipulated hundreds of contact sheets directly in
Premiere Pro by importing the stills as high-res files and then cutting and
repositioning to bring them to life. “I don’t know how we would have achieved
the final aesthetic in any other way,” he says.
All of this also helps the film visually represent the
eclecticism of Sparks’ career.
As producer George Hencken says, “The typical thing about
Sparks is there’s nothing typical about them, and this film reflects that.”
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