How Animation & Documentary Filmmakers Built Pharrell’s Musical Biopic ‘Piece By Piece’

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To its core, Piece By Piece is totally ambitious. The acclaimed new biopic-documentary hybrid interprets the life story of hip-hop legend Pharrell Williams through Lego animation, diving into blocky depictions of synesthesia, famous music videos and the intricacies of Pharrell’s imagination. Piece By Piece is set to be the first Lego feature released under Universal (via its boutique indie distribution arm, Focus Features) since it picked up the license in 2020.

‘The documentary impulse and the animation impulse are diametrically opposed. There was a healthy debate we constantly had about how we keep all the rawness and imperfections of documentary in animation.’

— Director Morgan Neville

Helming the project is Morgan Neville, a live-action documentarian known for Best of Enemies, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? and 20 Feet From Stardom, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. Neville’s return to musical storytelling shows his fascination with genius. “Pharrell is full of magical thinking, the idea of, ‘If everybody’s going this way, I’m going off that way,’” Neville tells Animation Magazine. “I responded to that and thought, ‘Why can’t we do a film like this? Why not?’ I think this is reflective of his whole career.”

Neville quickly realized that Lego wasn’t just a gimmick to Pharrell. “It’s central to how his creative process works, this idea of constructing your own realities and having agency over your destiny,” he adds. “This whole film is about how we listen to our creative voices, how we lose touch with them and how the world wants us to remain stagnant. All those questions are very interesting to me.”

Footage Feast

Animators are used to working with reference footage, but Pharrell asked Neville to take that to the extreme. “The first time I met Pharrell, his pitch to me was, ‘I want you to make a documentary about my life, and when you finish it, I want you to throw out all the footage and do it again in Lego,’” Neville recalls. “So I feel like we made the film twice. We made a version of the film where we did the interviews, the archive footage, the movie clips and some rough storyboards. Then we came to Howard and started again from the beginning, re-storyboarding the whole film.”

‘When we were showing Pharrell designs of characters using the Lego hair that was available, I remember at one point he said, ‘I really don’t feel represented.’ It was wildly eye-opening for me.’

— Animation director Howard E. Baker

The Howard in question is Howard E. Baker of Pure Imagination Studios, the animation house responsible for a wealth of Lego-animated projects, including 2010’s The Adventures of Clutch Powers, which Baker directed four years before Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s The Lego Movie. Coming onto Piece By Piece after the footage had been shot, Baker felt less like he was simply remaking a live-action documentary.

“I always felt like we were making a movie for the first time,” Baker explains. “Morgan’s version of the film was, for me, my crew and my board artists, like a script. Morgan allowed us to take a lot of the ideas that were in the first version of the film.” Some of Baker’s team had to learn to go against their instincts. “As artists who had come from a traditional animation background, they wanted to restructure it more like an animated film. I think Morgan did have to, at one point, say, ‘No, let’s keep the structure.’”

Shifting Gears

This conflict was borne from the way the film flows between different styles. “There are three storytelling gears,” Neville explains. “There’s a documentary gear, where we’ve got a music video or footage we shot that we’re translating into animation. Then there’s a cinematic gear, which is when somebody’s telling a story and it’s like a regular movie. And finally the music gear, which is when the music comes in, the real world disappears and the rules go out the window.”

For Neville, this could only work in a fully animated film. “I’ve made documentaries before where we have animated sequences, but when you go to an animated sequence, that’s a huge leap for a viewer. When you’re in the Lego world and suddenly your character takes off and is floating in space, you just go with it.”

That didn’t stop the two mediums from clashing. “The documentary impulse and the animation impulse are diametrically opposed,” says Neville. “In animation, you have a great deal of control. You can world-build, you get to decide every detail of every item. In a documentary, you have no control. You walk into a room and you don’t get to decide what it looks like, you don’t always get to decide where to put the camera. There was a healthy debate we constantly had about how we keep all the rawness and imperfections of documentary in animation.”

Baker backs up that need for balance. “Because animation is so pragmatic, we have this instinct of trying to make everything perfect. There are art directors and people in animation who are so snobbish about how everything needs to be perfect all the time, but we had to try and keep things casual and natural. A lot of the time, we would do things and ask Morgan, ‘Do you think this is OK?’ And he’d be like, ‘Well, yeah. It’s a documentary, that’s what it looks like.’ There were even times where we had to say to Morgan, ‘But, Morgan, it’s a documentary!’ because he might have tried to make things too perfect. Finding that balance was difficult.”

The animation production of feature was done entirely out of house by Los Angeles-based Pure Imagination (under executive producers Joshua R. Wexler and Sanjee K. Gupta) and Zebu Animation Studios in India. Pure Imagination was brought on board to take creative leadership to develop and produce the visual storytelling for the film, based on recordings and interviews done during Covid. Pure Imagination worked with creator network Tongal on some of the designs and ran look development and shot production through Zebu Animation, which also led the art direction.

Seeing Sounds

By taking on an animated project, Neville had a steep learning curve, but he clung onto the specific ideas he was interested in exploring. Pharrell’s synesthesia, a condition that lets him see sounds taking the form of colors, was one of those ideas. “It’s a kind of superpower, it certainly stands in for that. When Pharrell [in the film] is at his most creative, this synesthesia is at its most saturated and prevalent. That was something we had a lot of discussions about, how synesthesia could be a storytelling device which we could show in animation and never show in a regular documentary.”

Baker brought in an industry legend to tackle Piece By Piece’s depiction of synesthesia. “I called Michel Gagné, who’s famous for doing synesthesia animation in films like Ratatouille. He was like, ‘I think I’m done doing synesthesia.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but have you done it out of Lego?’ At one point, I was very convinced the film was really about synesthesia. That faded away just because it became overwrought. There were times when storyboards had synesthesia everywhere.”

What you can make from Lego is only inhibited by the blocks available. However, adapting a real-life story forced Lego to think more about diversity. “Hair and skin tone were things that Pharrell knew were going to be really important,” Neville says. “We discussed that from the get-go with Lego. We wanted to be able to do more to represent the varieties of African American skin tones and hair representation. I think I’m really proud of how many different things we were able to pioneer in the film, in terms of pushing Lego into new directions.”

Baker echoes Neville’s point with an anecdote. “When we were showing Pharrell designs of characters using the Lego hair that was available, I remember at one point he said, ‘I really don’t feel represented,’” Baker recalls. “It was wildly eye-opening for me. From that day on, I remember trying to be more open to the idea that these things do need to change and that we had the power to do that. I’m really proud of that, too.”

Focus Features releases Piece By Piece in U.S. theaters on October 11.