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 - 5th week
So 2013 have started with an explosion of
work… but no writing!
We moved up to the studio in Gdansk, and
set up our offices. In the place where the Painting Animation Work Stations
(PAWS) will be built for now we set up a badminton court (we have space for a tennis court and basket
ball court too, but soon it will be eaten up by the PAWS, so we will stick with
Badminton).
We had our editor and one of our head of
painting and two other painters start working full time on Vincent from 2nd
January. And yesterday we shot our first live action test. It seems ironic that
we are making a film about a painter whose most famous images personify heat
and southern sunshine and intense colour, and the project’s incubation is
taking place in the freezing whiteness of winter.
We drove out to a farm in Luban, an hour
outside Gdansk and deep in the countryside. We weren’t sure we could actually
even make down the driveway to the farm, on which the wind was adding fresh
snow to the already existing snowdrifts.
It was meant to be
minus 8, but with the wind chill it felt much more like minus 15. I was to play
Vincent, our co-head of Painting, Michal, was playing the mystery boy in a
cowboy hat, who it is speculated might have been Vincent’s killer, our head of
IT, Tomek, was playing his older brother, and our CFO, Maja was playing the
barmaid. As director Dorota managed to skip having to dress in summer clothes
at sub zero. We quickly changed around a wooden stove, inadequate to the task
of keeping us warm…
and headed into the
freezing barn, where we re-enacted a scene of Vincent hanging out with the two
boys at a bar. That was the warm part of the shoot. Next I had to lie on the
snow, camera in hand, while Michal laughed a manic deranged laugh into camera.
And then finally, with everyone else back in decent winter gear, I had to
re-enact the start of Vincent’s last journey, which involved lying on the
freezing floor of another barn, and getting up and stumbling outside as if I
had a bullet in my belly. For the shots where it was Vincent’s POV I could don
my coat over my costume, and my woolly hat under my straw hat.
But my feet in my
Vincent-esque tattered boots, remained blocks of ice.
When I was planning
the film I thought we were going to be doing this kind of stuff in a glorious
French Spring, not in quasi-arctic conditions. Still we now have new shots for
testing, Michal and Marlena started this morning, and the shoot was enjoyable despite
the cold. Although I think Michal enjoyed being my suspected killer a little
too much!
| by Hugh Welchman |
