As one half of dynamic music-producing duo The Neptunes, Pharrell Williams is used to crafting platinum-selling crowd pleasers, but now the music-maker has turned muse for fellow artist Yi Zhou.
Twenty nine year old Zhou first forged a friendship with Williams after they met two and a half years ago. "He immediately liked my films and was very keen to collaborate on a project together," she explains. Teaming up with new her bff gave Zhou an opportunity to combine working with the music super-producer with the long-standing desire to revisit one of her favourite childhood stories, The Nose from Gogol's Petersburg Tales.
"At the same time as wanting to write a story for Pharrell, I also wanted to indulge in one of the stories that I read when I was nine years old while living in China," she elaborates. "Pharrell's talent as a producer is strictly linked to the idea of hearing so for me the ear was the perfect symbol to act as a starting point for the film," she explains.
The main character played by Williams loses his ear, which then embarks on a transcendental journey of its own, going through several stages of metamorphosis, before ultimately forming a bridge with the inner ear.
Zhou's artwork mainly consists of large multi-media installations that blend film, digital animation, photography and sculpture, and indeed The Ear is partly shot in 3D animation.
The Ear incorporates medieval and contemporary images, while also managing to bridge Zhou's Chinese and Mediterranean upbringing. She was raised in China until the age of 10 and then moved to Rome before jetting between London and Paris to complete a degree in Political Science and Economics.
The short-film has taken around seven months to complete and has been garnished with a stellar sound track thanks to the producing talents of Schmooze, and famed Italian composer and conductor Ennio Morricone, who, when he saw the film, loved it so much that he gave the creative team permission to use his music as the soundtrack. "The film is the result of a long and extremely lengthy project so I'm amazed and happy and I feel very blessed that Ennio liked it", she says of Morricone's aesthetic thumbs-up.
The sublime journey of The Ear is being shown in London in mid-October as a preview to Zhou's exhibition in China at the Suzhou True Colour Museum on November 8. The film is a co-production between PYSCHO / PREMIERE HEURE.
