The Complete Story of "The Pianist"

"The Pianist" is a short animated film written, directed, produced and animated by Thodoris Sarafis. Me! It premiered on the 29th of March 2024 on TheOh!Toons YouTube channel.

I don't know if "short film" is the right description for it though. Maybe "musical"... "music video" or even better "music video with a twist". Or just an exercise on animating faces perhaps? Whatever you call it... it was made and I am really proud of it.

Dionisis Savvopoulos, the Greek songwriter, once said that everything we experience, hear, see, taste and touch is swallowed inside us, where an inner sculptor shapes these raw elements into one single, unified creation. Many of my projects and the stories I am telling here are exactly that: elements from different times in my past that I have mixed together to produce a single film.

"The Pianist" is one such project and its story is a long one.

In previous stories, I mentioned that during my high school years (1998), I was in a band, a singer and guitarist and one of the two songwriters of the group. We performed in four or five concerts live covers of famous Greek songs. I don't want to give the wrong impression—the band was NOT good. We had a few very talented singers, and people seemed to enjoy themselves at our concerts. Mostly because only our friends and families would come to see us.

We would always rehearse on my place. My parents were tolerant of so many noisy people at home, my room was big enough to fit them all and I had guitars and a piano and a four-track cassette recorder. So my room became our first recording studio.

At one concert, some famous people heard us and we were invited to play at a proper club with a very famous and successful Greek band for two nights. Not all of us and not as a group. They selected the best singers out of us and had us perform with their band on their audience. First night went great! The second night, we went there -full of ourselves- and we… were terrible!!! At the end of the night, the youngest member of the group, the most talented of us, having faced his first (and probably his only) failure in his life left the place where the rest of us were all sitting. I approached him and started talking. We were never that close, but something burst out of him that night. He started to talk about himself, his life, his nightmare childhood, his dreams, his place in the band and his friendship with most of us. He was the only one of us, who wasn't doing this just for fun. He actually wanted to make a living from it. Music and singing was his life!

Joke’s on us, because he actually became a professional singer, achieving worldwide success and recognition and collaborating with many famous singers, songwriters, and musicians that everyone knows and loves.

But back then, that night, he was a scared and confused little boy and thought his chance of making his dreams come true were shattered. I was the only one who happened to be around, so he looked up to me for advice and guidance.

We talked a lot and I don't think I could answer any of his questions or actually help him that much. I was not much older than him and knew nothing about how the music industry or how the world worked. But I was there for him as much as I could be. I did come up with a few vague theories on how to find strength and keep fighting to reach your goals, no matter what life throws at you. Failure builds character and all that. He really was bad that night (we all were), but from this experience he now knows what works and what doesn’t. He was the luckiest of us all, because at that a young age he had the talent, he had a clear goal and now started to gain the experience.

The very next day, he came to my house with a piece of paper. He said he wanted to thank me for being there for him and handed me the paper. On it were the lyrics for a song called simply "Thank You". He asked if I could write the music for it. And so I did. I think it was that same afternoon that I returned the visit with my guitar. I stood in his room and played the song! He liked it! We talked more about what was troubling him and we arranged for him to come to my place and record it—just the two of us, not the band.

Now, I am a guitarist. Everything I compose or play, I want it to sound good on the guitar. He was a pianist. So when he came to record, he sat on my piano and played the damned thing beautifully! We added nothing more. Just the piano and our voices -I think it is the only duet we ever did together- and then never thought about, talked about, or played it again. It remained on a cassette and a hard drive for a very long time.

A few years later (2002), I was at university in England, taking my first degree in Time-based Media (Filmmaking and Animation), and we were tasked with coming up with a rebranding campaign (logos, ads and merchandise) for a TV music channel that was splitting into four new channels: one for classical music, one for techno, one for disco, and one for retro music. My campaign was based on the idea that these channels would make other ways of listening to music obsolete. You would see people listening to music in ordinary situations, revealing that the music was coming from the TV and not the stereo, the radio, the CD player, or whatever. For example, people would go running in the park and instead of their Walkmans or Discmans, they would carry their TVs. Or they wouldn't go to a club to dance, but to the neighbour’s house with the biggest and best TV.

One of those scenarios was that of a man playing a classical piece on the piano, only to reveal that he is not actually playing it. He is pretending, having gotten carried away by the music playing from his TV. We don’t even know if he is actually capable of playing the piano or even owns one.

Fast forward to the present (2024). While cleaning old backups, I found my old university projects, and there they were… the storyboards for those ads. And that one with the pianist struck me differently this time.

It reminded me of what it was like when I was learning to play the guitar. No matter how badly I was playing, it still sounded heavenly to me. I would always imagine myself playing like a pro, rushing my amateur status to that time in the future where I would actually be good.

But that’s the thing with all of us I think. As John Cleese has said, when you are learning something, you lack the knowledge needed to properly assess how good you are. You start on your journey without the data to figure out if the end is ten steps away or ten thousand or ten million.

It is strange how your own creation can have a totally different meaning a few years later.

I really wanted to do a film about it. But I needed to find the right music for it first. This one felt a bit personal to me, and I wanted it to be my own music. So, I sat at the piano to play my old songs and find one that would sound nice on the piano. Now, as I said earlier, I am a guitarist. I can work my way around a piano, but I am not a pianist. So, I couldn’t make any of my songs sound better on the piano than on the guitar. And then I remembered. I have one that has been played by a very good pianist!

I dug deep into my backup drives and found that recording. Remember, it was recorded on a 4-channel cassette recorder back then and the sound quality was terrible! So, I practiced playing it myself on the piano, note for note, until I could replicate his playing exactly. Eventually, I got close. But not quite. The notes were pretty much there, but it was dry, aggressive, without the original’s soul and heart. Desperate, I asked my good friend and great musician, Chris Maragoudakis, to play it. And he did! And it was lovely!

Without the lyrics and with a new purpose, the song had to be renamed. I decided to call it "Delusions of Greatness" because it fits! A very simple song, composed by a seventeen year old, played classically to appear just a bit more than what it actually is.

And now I am even more psyched to do this! I filmed myself pretending to play it, while doing the most comical facial expressions I could to fit the feeling of each part. I had my script, my music, my acting guide - now I needed a character design.

I wanted for sentimental reasons my virtuoso to look like the one I had drawn on the storyboard back when it was conceived. I can’t remember what decisions led to that specific design so I wanted to honour my past self. But I also wanted him to have a more stern and commanding face, but one that could be ridiculed at the end. For some reason, I had Herbert von Karajan in mind—a very serious, very authoritative figure. But to be able to ridicule him in the end, I elongated his head a bit, widened his eyes, and pointed his nose. And then I made him bald, just because. And my pianist was ready to get up on stage!

So that is the story of "The Pianist." A song and story that existed in my mind for years, completely independent of each other, dusted off, polished and combined to tell another, different story. A story about dreams and insecurities, greatness, or… you know… delusions of greatness.