Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘N’ Roll

A web trailer promoting A.C.T.’s premiere of Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘N’ Roll. The play follows a Marxist professor and his rock obsessed protégé fight for freedom in Soviet-dominated Prague.

Originally conceived as a typographic animation the concept evolved into a journey covering each of the plays settings. Red silhouettes along with the traveling red thread serve as a thematic device tying each time period with the next.

Set to the music of The Plastic People of the Universe the animation references events from the play and albums such as The Velvet Underground and Nico, Syd Barrett‘s The Madcap Laughs and Pink Floyd‘s The Dark Side of the Moon. Historical events are depicted from Prague’s Velvet Revolution, the 1969 landing of the moon, the Russian Perestroika and the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.