Animated Van Gogh paintings

I saw Loving Vincent this afternoon, a fascinating film. The fascination isn’t so much with the story, rather with how the movie was made.

The guy in the title is Vincent Van Gogh. The events take place a year after Vincent’s death. Since Vincent wrote lots of letters he became friends with postman Joseph Roulin. The postman has one last letter to Vincent’s brother Theo, but it came back undeliverable. So he sends his son Armand to deliver it in person, or find out why. Armand ends up in the town Auver-sur-Oise, where Vincent had been both a good friend and a patient of Dr. Gachet and where Vincent had died of a gun wound. While waiting for the doctor to return from Paris Armand has a few days to talk to the locals to try to find what happened. They tell their stories in flashbacks.

At the end of the movie we are told that Vincent created 800 paintings in his eight years as an artist. He managed to sell … one. His art supplies were provided by Theo. He is now considered the father of modern art.

On to how the movie was made. It is essentially Vincent’s paintings come to life. All of the characters are ones that he had painted and the movie recreates those paintings and animates them. The 90 minutes of film mean 65,000 frames. All of them were hand painted. The scenes of Armand were painted to imitate Vincent’s originals and are quite colorful. The flashback scenes are in black and white and are of a different style of painting that almost looks photographic. The credits list 131 painters.

The live actors performed before sets that looked like Vincent’s paintings or before the standard Green Screens. The live action frames then became a guide for the animated frames.

The official movie website says there were 898 different shots in the film. This resulted in 898 paintings. As the scene proceeds the shot is painted over for each successive frame. That way the background doesn’t pulsate because the brushstrokes of one frame don’t match with the next (unless it is depicting rippling water or windblown wheat). However we do get that pulsating on the characters as they move.

Watching Van Gogh paintings come to life is a wonderful way to spend 90 minutes.