As a part of Led Zeppelin’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations, Nexus Studios directorial duo Alan Smith and Adam Foulkes teamed up with Fender to create animated short The Mystical Journey of Jimmy Page’s ‘59 Telecaster.
The film is shaped around Jimmy’s own words on his relationship with the iconic guitar. Immersing themselves in the heady days of the late 60’s, Smith and Foulkes creatively expanded around Jimmy’s narrative to focus on what happened when these two creative energies collided.
A team of animators at the London and Los Angeles-based Nexus Studios worked to visually convey the atmosphere and energy of the time and illustrate key moments in the development of the legendary rock band. The film shows how Jimmy’s personalisation of the Telecaster – into the famed Dragon and Mirror versions – takes Led Zeppelin to previously uncharted sonic horizons.
“It goes without saying that everybody loves a dragon,” Smith and Foulkes commented. “And we made full use out of that! But it was much trickier to visually illustrate the mirror guitar which was more about the optical sensation of prismatic light patterns. So we hit upon this idea of how images are bent and twisted in a Hall of Mirrors, which seemed to fit the idea of new sounds being distorted as Jimmy experimented with the Telecaster.”
