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 - 3rd week
So
we spent yesterday - a day of dense golden winter sunshine- in the car,
and today… the day of walking around Amsterdam… we woke up to a slushy
blustery storm and a blanket of grey outside; again good traveller
awareness! So it goes…
We
braved the blustery rain of Amsterdam to walk the Van Gogh mile. The
van Gogh mile is a nice idea: as the van Gogh museum is closed for
renovation, and temporarily part of the exhibition is re-located to the
Hermitage, a mile away, they strung a red line from the buildings and
bridges for tourists to follow, and along the way you can stand on red
dots on the pavement and listen to quotes from Van Gogh's letters
looping on speakers attached to doorways/lampposts/windowsills.
Additionally if you have an iPhone you can see some multimedia add on
through the Van Gogh mile App. This was designed for sunny days! The
wind meant it was hard to hear the quotes, juggling your iPhone and
umbrella at the same time as putting earphones on and off is
challenging.
(Check out the Vincent umbrella!)
(Check out the Vincent umbrella!)
However
there was an upside to doing it in these conditions. On a raining
Sunday morning in November, with no shops open, central Amsterdam is
utterly empty. Normally it would be bustling with tourists and people
going about their city business. But at this time and in these
conditions we were walking through these beautiful historic streets
entirely alone, with only the sound of the rain, and Vincent’s words
echoing across the streets. Pretty gezellig as the Dutch would say.
There was some acceptable augmented reality add ons in the App, I am
interested in augmented reality, but I am waiting to see one that has
wow factor. Maybe we should do one for Loving Vincent, I was thinking
that after the Liege 3D film festival. We gained all this expertise in
3D (we have so far won 15 best 3D awards) and we aren't applying it to
Loving Vincent. The film has to be 2D, for sure, but maybe we could do a
3D exploration, actually painted, where you go inside his paintings. I
have seen something like that, but they were computer simulations, which
just doesn't do it, it would need to be painted for real.
Finally
we reached the Hermitage, and swum- with and against- the mass of
people there. So many people that you have to bide your moments to get
the view you want. Still having to wait patiently to be able to see a
clear view of a painting from a distance gives you time to think, and to
witness the absurd cat and mouse that goes on between the tourists and
the security staff. There is a no photos policy here, which I understand
if people are using flash, but I don't really understand if they are
not. I can't think of any technical reason of how people snapping
soundlessly, flash off, from their smart phones, harms a painting?
Anyway a lot of the visitors seemed to agree; as soon as the Security
guard turned to chase some other young girl lining up her phone, then
everyone in the room whipped theirs out and snapped away. The sport of
this seemed to preoccupy many visitors more than actually standing and
looking at the painting! I kept my phone in my pocket and many thoughts
came to me. Firstly my revelation of the day before was confirmed, that
there was more depth in his work than you can appreciate from
reproductions. The outstanding example of this was Undergrowth,
http://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/vgm/zoom.jsp?page=3206&lang=en, and surprisingly Still Live with Bible.
http://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/vgm/zoom.jsp?page=3206&lang=en, and surprisingly Still Live with Bible.
(source: wikipaintings)
Other things that struck me, was transitions. Seeing the paintings in real-life you notice the smaller elements much more vividly: the falling leaves; the irises at the perimeter of a field. And there were at least two new characters that we wanted to add, not sure where or how, but they have to be added. First, the One Eyed Man…wow, this one passed me by. He looks like a crook from a Dickensian district, or a gangster from a film noir, and it is a great painting. For sure we have to get this shady character in there. In fact he was a fellow patient at the St Remy sanatorium, but maybe we can put him somewhere else, maybe Paris, he would fit among the brothels and cafes that Vincent frequented. All we have from Paris is the ex-muse/hooker turned club-owner/pimp-Segatori, whom Vincent got on the wrong side of, and the paint shop owner Pere Tanguy, who was reputedly a gnarled ex-communard, but looks more like a cherubic fat buddha in Vincent's painting. The second potential new character, is Camille Roullin, Postman Roulin's 11 year old son. Postman and his eldest son, Armand, feature centrally in our film, but now we should look for a place for Camille, as this is a fabulous portrait. Thirdly, Old woman of Arles, the first portrait in Arles, and perhaps the starting point for the greatest series of portraits by any artist. When I looked at this old woman I felt sure she would have something wise or mysterious to say about the little red painting fellow from the North!
This time I didn't spend much time in front of favourites like Wheatfield with Crows; Bridge in the rain (no idea how to get that into the film); the yellow house; The bedroom; Gaugin's Chair; Sunflowers; Almond Blossom; and Irises, as it was 1330, and we still had the ticking clock of Kroller Mueller, and the expired clock on our parking metre. We walked briskly to the tram stop, and saw our tram pulling out, we ran through the streets to see if we could catch it at the next stop, but it trundled along slightly faster than it was possible to run. Panting and red-faced we waited the 10 minutes for the next one. Our car retrieved, free of fines, we made a whistle-stop tour of the furniture shops on Overtoom, which had us salivating. I like Warsaw very much, it is a much under-rated city, but the fact that barren communism relinquished its hold on it only 20 years ago means that you just don't get the range of shops that you can get in places like London, Paris or Amsterdam. We can choose between Ikea and expensive imports that take weeks to pre-order. Half of our furniture came back with us from India. The furniture was cheap, but getting it into Poland was a nightmare, it was sealed up in customs because of dots and dashes that were out of place on our forms, and all the while I was being charged €30 a day rent for the privilege of the customs authorities completely unnecessarily rejecting my paperwork. Anyway you just don't get the same shops with great interesting furniture and fittings, reasonably priced, in the whole city, as on one block of that road in Amsterdam. And it turned out that some of the furniture in the shops was actually made in Poland. Made in Poland, but you can't buy it in Poland, the shop owner said he had a Polish couple come in and buy some furniture, made in Poland, and exported it back to Poland - you think given the fact that Poland is basically a building site, well all the roads and the major cities are, e.g.. in our block of flats out of 32 flats two thirds are currently being renovated, the dress code of my building is white or orange or blue overalls; and right now one of the main arteries in central Warsaw is closed as a second metro line is added; and construction of motorways and high speed rail links means that journey times are twice what they were (but with the promise of being half what they were and a quarter what they are)… anyway you would have thought someone in this thriving construction market would have sought to make it so you could buy quality Polish goods in Poland. Dorota, in amongst such innovative design, instantly re-imagined us going into import-export of the lights that we had just bought, which admittedly was incredibly cool, but I told the venture of Loving Vincent was quite mountain enough for us, and I just had to think of the customs impounding our India furniture to get shivers down my spine.
An hour behind schedule we careered off as fast as our plucky little car would take us to the Kroller Muller Museum. Still we arrived with an hour in hand. The Kroller Muller, looks like the hideaway of a bond villain, a low slung glass and brick building in a clearing of trees. There was a re-assuring graphic- VINCENT IS BACK- plastered over the windows by the entrance, but then the chief security guard was the spitting image of Odd Job (James Bond villain in Goldfinger), and eye-balled us as we passed, and I wondered if it was because we had arrived just before closing time, or if he did that to everyone. For a brief moment I imagined we were art thieves with some cunning plan to lift the goods from under the noses of the guards. We again by-passed a whole collection of magnificent art, not allowing even 5 seconds for this Picasso or that Gaugin, and bee-lined for the Vincent room.
Stunning… simply one of the most relaxing and wonderful ways to spend an hour. 40 or so of their 130 Vincent pieces were up, in simple wooden frames, against white walls. In the whole hour that we stayed in that room perhaps 4 other people walked through, and for a whole 20 minutes we were alone in the room. As you enter you find Madam Ginoux, M. Ginoux, Lieutenant Millet, Vincent, Mme. Roulin (Berecuse), and Postman Roulin all staring at you- that is half a billion dollars or so staring down at you! Heading left around the internal walls you have two walls dedicated to his dutch period. It starts with Girl in a woods, 1882. Mysterious, has something in common with the haunting Couple in the Woods from Auvers, painted just before his death, and while this early work is not a shade on the later work, still this is an intriguing painting. And then further back in time, with some paintings from the Borinage, and the one that I referred to in my first blog.
Not long after this his rough drawings gain a unique blockish style, and even though he still struggles with technically depicting the human form, he has worked through this somehow, and as a result he gained a unique style.
Vincent knew that his lack of formal training, his isolation from other artists, his late start, and even the fact that art-making just didn't come easily to him, as it did to the artists he crossed path with, many of whom are all but forgotten to history, at some level he knew that all of this wasn't necessarily a disadvantage. While still in Holland, he wrote: "As I have been working absolutely alone for years…I shall always see with my own eyes and render things originally."
Well moving around the square I arrived at a wall full of his later work. Wow, this was a real privilege, to sit down and have in front of you: 'Langlois Bridge', 'Pink Peach Tree' (the painting that Vincent gave to Mauve's widow discussed in Blog 2), 'Enclosed Wheatfield with Rising Sun', and in the centre of the wall, Terrace of a Cafe at Night. Each on of these is staggeringly affecting, interesting and involving, but 'Terrace of a Cafe Night' I think is deservedly the most famous. It is the first time he depicted a starry night; you want to hear know the conversation going on between the couple in the centre of the square, behind them, drawing you in, is a dark alleyway, out of which comes a horse and carriage, and also a lady in red is materialising out of the shadow, and in the middle a blur of ghostly green (?). The light from the night cafe dazzles, and when you get up close it looks as if he has actually carved it out of a block of yellow paint, it sticks out so much from the canvas, as do the stars, which look like they were squeezed directly onto the canvas from the tube- this bold thickness gives them their brightness. We had traversed half of a continent to get here, rushed from place to place, pushed our car, and ourselves, to our limits to cover everything in a weekend, and all on the first weekend that Europe descended into snow, but if for nothing else it was actually worth it just to be in that room. To see the rise and rise of a self willed artist from clumsy depictions to images that were part of a wholesale revolution in art, and which permeate to some extent into the visual consciousness of every one in North America, Europe and Japan. perhaps as interesting as witnessing the progress of his draftsman hand, which gained considerable craft and skill over his short career, you can also see his subjects by contrast were the re-hashing, re-expressing, re-rendering of images, ideas, literature, and ideals that he had held onto dearly in his former lives: as a boy living in nature; as a preacher's son; as a young dapper art dealer; as a boarding school teacher; as a religious fanatic, and finally as an artist. Images such as the reaper, the sower, the church spire, the worn out shoes, and the man of sorrow (Isiah 53). On adjacent walls at the Kroller Muller they had a drawing from 1882 and a painting done perhaps 2 months before he died.
(source: wikipaintings)
He was someone who had something he wanted to express, and what he wanted to express remained remarkably consistent even as his style evolved; and shortly before his death he actually found the means to express "it". Why after a life time of struggling to express yourself and communicate with the world, why would you, when you had just found the means to express what was in your heart to the world, would you then, at that point, choose to kill yourself?
At that point Oddjob, and seven other guards swept into our room and, for the last time on this trip, we were escorted from the premises, the last people in the museum. By the time we had reached the end of the path the museum had been shut down, and we were in the darkness of a winter forest. This is a special museum. The building is spacious, allowing you to really absorb what is around you, the collection is phenomeal, Mrs Kroller Muller had a limitless account and an artists eye, and the fact it is in the middle of a forest, a whole hour outside Amsterdam means it is often over-looked. I kicked myself for being one of the many who over-looked it on previous visits to Amsterdam; in the future I will make at least half a day to stop by this museum if I visit Amsterdam.
Our Journey had given us new energy for our endeavour, and had exposed us to new ideas for the film: new paintings that we want to include and new ideas for developing our visual approach. But it shed no light on the biggest mystery of all, the mystery surrounding his suicide, in fact quite the opposite, it made it even more unfathomable. This would be something we would have to grapple with back on our building site. We climbed into our car and started out on the 1,400 km drive back to Warsaw.
| by Hugh Welchman |
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