Annecy competition
Rosto
Photo: Ilona van Genderen
The Band is Back
Artist and filmmaker Rosto returns with Splintertime, the third film in a tetralogy based on his own songs. He talks to Melanie Goodfellow about the work. It has been more than a decade since artist, animator and filmmaker Rosto last played live with his rock ‘n’ roll group The Wreckers, but the spirit of the group lives on through their virtual reincarnation Thee Wreckers. The band’s music is the inspiration for an on-going series of shorts by Rosto, the third instalment of which, Splintertime, will screen in competition at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival this summer. Rosto is a regular guest at the French lakeside festival, where he has shown all his shorts, including the first two films in the Thee Wreckers series - No Place Like Home and Lonely Bones - as well as his off-the-wall, fairy-tale The Monster of Nix. “All four films are based on songs by a band I belonged to in the 1990s.
As happens with bands we passed our expiration date and it was basically over with our share of rock ‘n’ roll, but then I made it into a studio recording project and turned the guys into characters. They’re an über version of the original group. They don’t get old, don’t get girlfriends and children and don’t lose their hair,” explains Rosto. “I made the guys immortal by freezing what they looked like to me back then.” “I wanted to capture the unique spirit of what you go through when you’re a young man and you fall in love with the three guys -- it only lasts for a little while. My theory is that a rock ‘n’ roll group keeps that original fire for about seven years -like The Beatles -- then it’s over. I transcended that by trying to capture the whole thing in a triple album worth of recordings, and in the spirit, quite literally, of the band,” he adds. A co-production between Rosto’s Amsterdam-based Studio Rosto A.D, French Autour de Minuit and Belgian S.O.I.L., the short combines live action with a number of animation techniques. Kicking off where Lonely Bones ended, it shows the band members in the back of an ambulance, being driven around a mysterious empty landscape. A live action epilogue, featuring the real-life band members, hints at what has happened. “These are very intuitive, musical films so I let the
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music take me to places. There is no big arc between each short. They’re all individual works that can stand on their own two feet,” says Rosto, who describes the shorts as a sort of Fantasia for the rock and roll age. “Each short is based on a song from Thee Wreckers but I use it as raw material. I pull it apart, get rid of chunks, sometimes remix it, re-record it or even have additional recordings made. The idea is to come up with a new symphony where the visuals and the music blend into a new thing,” he continues. The filmmaker is now mulling ideas for the fourth and final instalment as well as working on the screenplay for a feature adaptation of his graphic novel Mind My Gap, a hybrid live action, animation work also inspired by the music of Thee Wreckers. “Every thing is connected to everything in my oeuvre and for the longest time I have told people I wanted to do a feature film adaptation of the novel but I never really saw how, but with distance, the penny finally dropped and I have a first draft,” says Rosto. Aside from his own projects, Rosto’s company Studio Rosto A.D is also producing Spitsbergen, a magical realist road-movie by UK stopmotion expert Suzie Templeton, who won an Oscar for her short Peter & The Wolf in 2008.