Daft Punk have just unveiled their first full-length motion picture, 'Electroma.' If you weren't able to catch it at film festival screenings, perhaps you viewed the five-minute excerpt Spinner premiered last week. The movie marks a new direction for the French electronic duo, who have adapted their artistic vision to a journey beyond sound. Removing both themselves and their music from the film, the pair craft an expedition through a silent cinematic world populated by lost robots on a quest to become human.

"From the beginning of Daft Punk and the way we decided to make music, we've always wanted to experiment with different art forms -- the idea of natural progression and the growth of an aesthetic that we have been trying to develop both musically and visually," Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter tells Spinner. "So we like the idea of expanding it and making it a gradual expansion both in content and also in ways of expressing ourselves."


With the focus on the visual this time, Daft Punk intentionally kept their music out of the film in lieu of tunes from the likes of Todd Rundgren and Curtis Mayfield. "I think one was that doing this film was also about doing everything that we hadn't done before so I was working on the cinematography and on many aspects of the film itself. The subject, the nature of the film, we wanted to try to make something that you could not really time whether it was from the '70s or the late '60s or the '80s or the '90s or something just new. So we thought that the music pieces we chose would fit better with the story and with this kind of unknown origin whereas our music might be a little more contemporary."

Continuing the idea of entering new territory with film, Bangalter tells Spinner "We were really seduced by this idea of not sampling but really having an opportunity to create something with other people's music without really touching it that much which we don't usually have as when we make the music ourselves. So it was interesting to juxtapose a Chopin piece of classical music along Curtis Mayfield and in order to tell a story or to express something musically. So it's not sampling, and it's not just a selection of tracks, rather than almost using other people's music narrative. So we had done 'Interstella', the animation film that we had done where we were really telling the story along 15 tracks." Directors like Spike Jonze and Michele Gondry have notably created stunning visual to the music of Daft Punk, now the pair get to use the work of others to tell their story in the film.

Although the music and film has been kept separately there are parallel lines within the message being sent "There is a connection in the fact that both the album and the film speak about technology, it's something that we find to be fascinating and very seductive and also terrifying. So it is really this paradox of the robots and how cool a robot can be and how scary or how sad the situation can be of missing this part of humanity," Bangalter tells Spinner.

The film will take you on a journey through the creative minds of Daft Punk who sutebly remind us that they are 'Human After All.' Packed the vivid imagery designed to "leave an imprint on the viewers' memory or brain cells."
The DVD hits stores today and includes a 40 page booklet packed with images from the film. "We liked the idea of retelling the idea not just selecting some of the images where you don't have to watch the film again to look at these images and maybe for them to evoke the experience of the film itself. So there is no behind the scenes or anything, everything is in the film itself. And in the images of the film that we want you to select and to share again even after the light has come up and you have sent us home," say Bangalter. Where will Daft Punk's unconventional drive to invent themselves take them next?

Buy 'Electroma' on DVD