Becoming Led Zeppelin Documentary Preview Goes Online

Bruce Henne | 09-06-2021

Becoming Led Zeppelin artwork

(hennemusic) Led Zeppelin are sharing the first video preview of their first official documentary, "Becoming Led Zeppelin", in sync premiere at the 78th Venice International Film Festival on September 4.

A video trailer features the film's logo alongside live footage of the band to a soundtrack of "Good Times Bad Times", the opening track from their self-titled 1969 debut album.

Directed by Bernard MacMahon (American Epic), and co-written and produced by Allison McGourty, the project will feature new interviews with Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, and John Paul Jones, as well as rare archival interviews with the late John Bonham.

The film traces the journeys of the four members through the music scene of the 1960s, their meeting in the summer of 1968, and culminates in 1970 when their second album knocked The Beatles off the top of the charts.

The documentary features never-before-seen archive film and photographs, state-of-the-art audio transfers of the band's music and the music of other artists who shaped their sound.

"With 'Becoming Led Zeppelin', my goal was to make a documentary that looks and feels like a musical," says MacMahon. "I wanted to weave together the four diverse stories of the band members before and after they formed their group with large sections of their story advanced using only music and imagery and to contextualize the music with the locations where it was created and the world events that inspired it.

"I used only original prints and negatives, with over 70,000 frames of footage manually restored, and devised fantasia sequences, inspired by 'Singin' In The Rain', layering unseen performance footage with montages of posters, tickets and travel to create a visual sense of the freneticism of their early career." Watch the video preview here.

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