Blondie: Animar En La Habana
Viva La Música
Blondie: Vivir En La Habana (2021) is a three-part documentary short film directed by New York City's singular Rob Roth: multidisciplinary filmmaker, photographer, and performing artist. He also happens to be a long
Roth's 18-minute triptych is a well-framed portrait of the iconic rock group and its wave-making members: Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, and Clem Burke.
The film was shot by Nick Wiesner and assembled meticulously by editor Ben Swanson-Ralph, with rare images captured during Blondie's musical excursion to Cuba in the naïve late 2010s.
The end result is a steady-and-heady mix of en vivo stage performances and scrawled-upon volleys of b-roll.
Official Trailer
My Role
It was my pleasure to bring about the persistent side plot of frenetic illustrations inhabiting each chapter.
My contribution helped bring the story to life while honoring the band's sense of humor and punk personality.
Water, Fire, & Air:
The Challenge
Scratching beneath the documentarian surface, Roth envisioned a kind of metaphysical current of energy flowing throughout the story.
The idea was to take some of the b-roll footage and augment each frame with hand-drawn effects and playful animation, altogether a mystical distillment of creativity and interconnectedness.
There would be no sign of it in the digital realm, but only on Wiesner's transportational film stock would the otherwise ineffable become manifest to a seeing audience.
It would be rendered in the manner of some experimental drawn-on-film works of the mid-to-late 20th century— designs etched onto the acetate by artisanal hand with a visceral directness, or as the writeup in Rolling Stone has it, old school.
With this direction realized, music itself might be refracted into countless tiny indulgences and woven through the fabric of finely chopped photographic material gathered between Cuba and New York.
Due to reasonable restrictions (like not being allowed to f*** up the original footage), my version was achieved via laptop and small Wacom tablet.
The Approach
Rob's direction for each chapter included a list of ideas and guidance regarding the overall narrative my work was meant to support. From there, i had room to translate our objectives into specific design execution, while flagging additional opportunities for illuminatory embellishment along the way.
The first step was finding and prepping individual segments of untreated footage later to be non-destructively vandalized in Adobe Photoshop. Most had a second copy bearing superimposed tracking guides, timing cues, and other supplemental reference material.
I found it helpful to try and split the work into two categories...
For many of these moments, a simple zig-zag or outline would ascribe a supernatural vibrato onto physical objects in the scene.
Other instances called for newly imagined props or characters, requiring more intentional animation.
Photoshop's video timeline functionality (in conjunction with several hundred layers) afforded me a relatively direct, if not literally "hands-on", engagement with the footage.
The Result
Blondie had its North American premiere at Tribeca Film Festival in 2021, followed by a live Blondie show.
It also screened at a bunch of other festivals around the world and everyone really liked it a lot.
I was too nervous to ask Debbie for a photo at the 3rd annual BBC Reel Longshots festival in 2022, where it won the Audience Award by online vote.
You can see the whole thing here.