Loving Vincent's diary - 1st week

BreakThru's producer Hugh Welchman (Oscar Winner for producing BreakThru's Peter and the Wolf) and painter/director Dorota Kobiela (director of BreakThru's Little Postman and Chopin's Drawings) are co-writing BreakThru's latest film, Loving Vincent, the world's first feature length painting animation film. The film is a mystery thriller looking into the life and death of Vincent Van Gogh, and is told through bringing over 120 of Vincent's masterpieces to animated life...

The script is on its fourth, and final, draft, and wth production scheduled for spring 2013, the pressure is mounting. This weekly diary will candidly record their process of writing the elusive final draft.

Loving Vincent's diary - 1st week

This week was the first week that we took the first concrete steps towards the new (and final) draft. The warsaw office/flat rennovation has been eating away at our time, finishing a flat that has to be an office for us and our colleagues, welcoming to clients, and a place to live shares some attributes with writing: 

- you find that a little thing that you are sure will be done in a few minutes sucks away at a day;

- you get carried away on an idea that ends with you exhausted having re-arranged everything at 8 in the morning;

- you find there is a little corner that gets you unstuck and threatens to unravel everything, and;

- the thing that you cherish just doesn't fit, and has to be thrown out.

But this week the balance shifted and Vincent re-entered our lives: on the night of our 2nd wedding Anniversary. After a day of rennovation work we went out for a late meal around 10pm and a frivilous meal turned serious at the digestif stage when we started to go through photos of our first two years of marriage: we discussed our hopes and fears for the future, and it turned out anxiety about the final draft of the script loomed large… so we decided to do something about it there and then: and started reading through Vincent's letters; and then watched a film on Caravaggio; and finally at around 5am started to brainstorm new approaches to the film, acting out a new opening sequence.

In the days after our main preoccupation was to see if there was a character in his life that could take on the investigative role in the film, provide some frame narration, and also looking at upping the mystery without jettisoning the link to our research. Basically lots of discussion and several new pages written, but no decisive breakthru. We did write a concept for our Kickstarter Video, so we will shoot a dummy run of that the next time we are in the Gdansk studio.

Still... by week end the idea of the week was the one that came at 5am on our wedding anniversary night, that seems to be the only one destined to make it into the film! So… by Friday we were drained of ideas and frustrated. The very next email that arrived gave us the news that our films Magic Piano and Little Postman had both won prizes at the Liege 3D Film Festival and would we be able to come next week and accept the awards. Dorota has never picked up in person any of the 5 first prizes that Little Postman has won, and I have never picked up any of the 5 that Magic Piano has won, and I had been looking for an excuse to go to Holland anyhow. So I looked on the map- 10 hours drive to Liege, and from there one hour on to the Borinage, the place Vincent was a preacher to the miners, and then 2 hours up to the museums in Holland. I decided this is what we needed - to get out of this flat, pick up the prizes and then go an immerse ourselves in Vincent paintings for a weekend. We were sitting at the coffee table by our new book shelf researching all the Dutch museums that have Van Goghs. We looked at the route this would take us, and decided it was too full on. So I remarked "Do you think the paintings in the Hague are worth bothering about", at which point our Vincent books, 12 out of several hundred, clattered onto the floor just behind us… all the other books were unmoved. We looked at each other bemused, and decided that obviously someone disagreed that the Hague paintings weren't worth bothering about, and put the Hague back into our itinerary. Had Vincent entered our lives in more ways than one?

Here is a picture of the books on our perfectly level shelves! What will we find in the Hague?

 by Hugh Welchman