‘Entergalactic’ Director Fletcher Moules On A Music-Forward Narrative & Showing The “Artist’s Hand” In Animation
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After hearing early demos from Kid Cudi, director Fletcher Moules knew he could connect with the vision of bringing a visual album to life through animation. Serving as an animated companion piece to Kid Cudi’s album of the same name, Entergalactic follows street artist Jabari (Cudi) as he is on the cusp of bringing his art to life in comics. His life changes when he falls for his neighbor Meadow (Jessica Williams), a photographer about to stage an exhibition. It was important for Moules that this special be a character-driven concept album, rather than one long music video, so the story and animation style were essential to get right.
DEADLINE: Where did the concept for Entergalactic come from?
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FLETCHER MOULES: [Kid] Cudi had the idea. “Entergalactic” was the name of one of his songs from many years ago on an early album, and he wanted to visualize his music. We sat around and he talked to Kenya [Barris] about the idea that you could release music in a different way. Purple Rain was a really good example of Prince releasing an album that was also a narrative. These sort of concept albums have been around for a long time, but there hadn’t been one that had really leaned into the story and led with the characters. That was something that Cudi and Kenya Barris really wanted to do, so the concept there really became leading the release of new music with a narrative story to go with it.
DEADLINE: Were the songs completed before the script or were they written in tandem?
MOULES: Kind of both. When the writing process began, Cudi had probably six of the songs that were demoed and those were the earmarked narrative songs. “New Mode” really kicks off the story. “Willing to Trust” and “Can’t Shake Her” are both huge moments in the story, and there are a few others. And then, when Ian [Edelman] and Maurice [Williams] came on board as the writers, they had those songs as markers in their roadmap for where to take the script. That was so important to me because I could really feel the product. It was so rare as a director to come in and to have music that you could feel from the start, and that was such a huge jumping off point for me and my team. As we worked through it, it became apparent like any creative process that we needed some other things along the way. So, I would say to Cudi, “Hey, we need a moment here that feels like this or sounds like this.” And he would come back with another great track that would just slot right in and really fleshed out the whole album.
DEADLINE: How do you make sure that the focus stays on being a music-driven narrative, rather than a long music video?
MOULES: I think that’s the unique nature of Entergalactic. We all came into this with that exact notion in mind that it’s really easy to make it a long music video and, to be honest, most of the public assumed this to be that. So, we came in with the idea that we wanted to make an analog love story. It was about two characters willing to give love a go in New York City and to be very contemporary. With that in mind, we knew the music was upfront, first and foremost, but also it was really just making a story that really engaged you. I think that one huge roadmap we had was that Maurice Williams was on a flight back from New York and he was watching When Harry Met Sally…, and he was like, “What if we use that as a major guide?” And so, having films like that as sort of a marker in our process was hugely important, and also meant that the characters came first and that you were engaged. Like any film you watch, but especially in animation, tracking the emotional arc and being involved with those characters emotionally is so important. So, we just treated it like we were making an animated movie.
DEADLINE: Where did that style of animation come from?
MOULES: When an artist puts out an album, it’s a piece of art. They’re expressing themselves and you can love it or hate it, but the world reacts to it. And I think that sense of emotionality had to be on screen, so I wanted to make sure that the show looked like a moving piece of art and that the artist’s hand was on the screen the whole time and that you saw the imperfections. The concept art wasn’t references, the concept art was the show. That’s something that I’ve always wanted to do, because it’s so expressive. So, the look came from wanting to see the artist’s expression on screen the whole time. You’re going to see that in the design of everything. The painter’s textures that are on the skin and all the highlights are even hand brushed, so everything’s hand painted and we just tried to hide the computer at every turn. The computer was used obviously as a tool in order to make it, but all of the usual things that a computer would give you, like reflections and the shadows, we switched off.
It was a huge task for us to replace all that with paintings. So, where a highlight might be on skin or on glass, they’re all hand brushed in Photoshop and then used to be mapped on where a normal reflection would be. The shadows and all of the creases in the clothes have been hand brushed. So, like instead of having a fabric fold in CG, we would look at how it would fold and then we would hand paint that in order to mimic it. Then with the animation style, how the characters moved was the same way. Two humans who are falling in love and expressing themselves, sitting down in a diner in New York City, is very real. We’ve all seen that. So, we had to make sure the animation really sucked you in and you had to feel connected to it. The animators had to go through hand by hand, like stop motion, and fill the frames in just so you felt the artist’s hand. It may feel choppy to some people, and that to me is actually a good thing because it feels like it’s handmade. It should feel like a stop motion show, even though it was all done in a computer.
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