Loving Vincent's diary - 3rd 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 - 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!)

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.
 

(source: wikipaintings)

The best thing about the exhibition at the hermitage was that you could look at the ground floor paintings from the balconies above, over the heads of the 1,000's of people. From this distance the Bible and table were actually there, you felt that you could reach in and pull out the massive grey tomb, or the battered much-thumbed Zola book perching small it at its feet. This painting was not the first that openly addressed his father's death. He had completed the haunting 'The Old Church Tower at Nuenen', but this was at Theo's suggestion, and he initially had resisted the subject. Still the result is very arresting, and you can sense the emotional depth in the painting. But 'Still Life with Bible' is the outstanding reflection on his father's demise. Six months after his father's death his mother asked Vincent to post Dorus's Bible to Theo, as their father had left it to him. A pastor's bible is a significant heirloom, and Vincent, the eldest son, was yet again forced to hand the baton on to his younger brother. Apparently the bible 'fell open' as he was sorting through his clutter on Isiah 53. By this time Vincent had gone full circle and was back to being an atheist, but during his period of religious fanaticism he effectively memorised the entire bible, and so he would have had no trouble in knowing just from sight of the heading what was contained therein: "He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief". Vincent's position in Nuenen was getting past the point of being untenable, he was now under siege from all sides: long ago rejected by polite society; and since his father's death completely frozen out by his famil;, hounded by the catholic priests for immorality; pursued by creditors and shunned by the peasantry. In amongst this, he sat down, and in a day, by his account, painted a painting on a whole new level, that oozes emotion. The imagery is not subtle, with the heavy darkness of his father's bible, dwarfing, but not outshining, the ragged Zola tome at its feet, with a snuffed out candle standing to the side of the bible, but it is heartfelt, and for me in a day achieves more than months of working and re-working delivered in The Potato Eaters. (I have to say this is my personal opinion and Dorota along with the majority of art historians would disagree)

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

Pirates!, Aardman and the power of mixed-media animation

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists is well on its way to being a box-office smash, and shows the brilliant Aardman Animation at their very best, but it's also a significant technical triumph, and a great demonstration of the strength of blending classic stop-motion techniques with cutting edge computer technology.

The Pirate Captain prepares to board...

Filled with the dry wit, hilarious visual gags and good-hearted adventure that has made Aardman Britain's leading animation studio, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists was released in the UK last week, and looks sure to be as much of a hit with audiences as with critics. Based on the first of a series of comic novels by Gideon Defoe (hence it's idiosyncratic title, which would sit much more comfortably on a bookshelf than a cinema hoarding, and which is being changed to the more manageable The Pirates! Band of Misfits for its US release) it also has the potential to become a sizeable franchise.

If it does, then its success will be well-deserved. The Pirates! is a gleeful piece of swashbuckling family entertainment, every frame stuffed with brilliant jokes that demand a second or third viewing and a fantastic cast including a star-turn by Hugh Grant as the hapless Pirate Captain and the incredible Imelda Staunton as a pirate-hating Queen Victoria. It also has a winning script which refuses to talk down to its audience, keeping the parents interested with cameo appearances by the Elephant Man and Jane Austen rather than cheap 'adult' humour.

Perhaps best of all, and easiest to pass over, is its gorgeous animation, which manages to stay true to the stop-motion which made Aardman's name in the 1980's and 90's while providing eye-bursting 3D and seamlessly introducing a variety of computer generated landscapes and effects. 

It's not Aardman's first foray into mixed-media animation: the apparently 'home-spun' Wallace & Gromit in the Cure of the Were-Rabbit involved the participation of leading post-production company MPC Films, who provided a plethora of computer generated bunnies to 'bulk out' those created by Nick Park and his team.

Can you separate the CG bunnies from their plasticine cousins?
I'm not sure we can...

In The Pirates! however, Aardman incorporated mixed-media techniques throughout the animation process. Computer generation was handled in-house, made possible by Aardman's earlier experiments with computer generated animation for their modestly successful all-CG collaboration with Dreamworks, Flushed Away. As so much of Pirate Captain's adventures take place on the water, a famously time-consuming substance to work with in traditional stop-motion, it naturally suggested the full-on incorporation of computer generated visuals. 

The ocean swells, the sweeping vistas of Victorian London and a host of other elements have been rendered digitally rather than in-camera, and it is a credit to the skill of Aardman's team that the effect is never jarring. Aardman have essentially updated an intrinsic principle of animation, in which the background is 'pre-rendered', whether this means painted onto a single surface or onto multiple panes of glass as in many of Disney's most lush environments, while the characters are animated by hand and overlaid. Here it was the motley band of pirates and their (not very sea-worthy) ship that were superimposed over the computer generated environment using green screen.

Animators work to blend the set and characters into the
computer generated ocean environment - here Charles Darwin
is readied to walk the plank into a digital ocean

It doesn't stop there, the animation has also been rendered in highly effective 3D, and contains numerous moments which imitate traditional cell-animation. These include the comic travelling sequences, in which the pirate ship careers around a map, leaving a confused trail of red dots as it ricochets off cherubs and is blown around by baroque zephyrs. The result is a technical palette which pays homage to great animations of the past, contains a visual style which is definitively 'Aardman-esque' (all ping-pong ball eyes and letterbox jaws) while also allowing for spectacular set-pieces. Most importantly of all, the various techniques compliment one another, rather than creating incongruities.

Mixed-media animation is something BreakThru Films feel very strongly about, so we'll be cheering The Pirates! on to success when it opens in the US later this month. Our current projects, and particularly the short animations created for Chopin's Études, have been created with a wide variety of technical processes, blended together to create visually distinctive films which are both aesthetically powerful and technically progressive. The Flying Machine sees live-action blending with computer generated graphics and 3D stop motion animation, continuing a lineage which extends back through Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Mary Poppins and beyond.

Our stop motion animated Flying Machine against
a computer generated vista

We're also very excited about Scarecrow, which has recently been selected for the BeFilm 2012 Underground film festival in New York at the end of this month. It's to be shown in 3D, as intended, and we hope it can demonstrate (as The Pirates! does) that 3D really can be the future of animation, if studios have the confidence to develop their films in true-3D, rather than simply slapping on the effect in post-production to increase box-office revenue. Used effectively, in collaboration with the other animation techniques, it can be spectacularly effective and moving.

Rotoscoping, a technique which has been used since
the birth of animation, gives Scarecrow a real sense
of living history

Scarecrow uses a combination of traditional animation, rotoscoping and 3D computer generated graphics to tell the story of a fallen soldier in Poland's November Revolution. The rotoscope technique allowed the animators to bring the startling paintings of Polish painter Jerzy Duda-Gracz to life, creating an aesthetic that at once stays true to the era Chopin evokes, while at the same time involving the work of one of Poland's most significant modern artists. As the story progresses and the soldier's soul seems to rise up from his broken body, directors Przemyslaw Anusiewicz and Janusz Martyn begin to introduce 3D computer generated elements, strange cloaked figures which dance above the marshland like animated shrouds. Viewed in 3D, it is an effect which simply could not be achieved with traditional animation, a true example of technology making the impossible possible.

Computer generated animation brings a more haunting aspect of
Duda-Gracz's art to life in striking 3D

Whether allowing pirate ships to spring forty feet above a crystal-clear ocean, or bringing a haunting vitality to some of Poland's most beautiful art and music, mixed-media techniques are keeping animation at the cutting edge of film-making. The sense that an animated film can embrace a wide variety of technical forms is one which keeps it fresh and responsive to innovation and creative thinking.  The days in which stop-motion or traditional animation and computer generation were seen as mortal enemies, with the latter poised to consign its frame-by-frame predecesor to the dustbin of history, are thankfully far behind us. At BreakThru we're constantly looking forward to the next advancement, and as Aardman's Pirates! seem poised to storm the US box office, we're proud to be among such illustrious company.

-Stewart Pringle

Follow the BreakThru Films blog for future articles on some of the revolutionary techniques that we;re developing for upcoming projects. Except the ones that are too secret to show you yet...shhh!

The Flying Machine - a multi-platform adventure

BreakThru Films founder and producer of The Flying Machine Hugh Welchman explains that the way we tell stories is changing all the time.

The Flying Machine will be taking off in more than cinemas

Our aim with The Flying Machine is to make a film that will push the boundaries of family animation, and for the range of products across different platforms that we are currently developing to be the first phase of the creation of an enduring franchise. We are in a period of massive change in the way that people are accessing and interacting with stories, music, art and games. Technology is not only changing the way we consume stories, it is changing the way stories are told.

BreakThru Films is all about delivering multiple entertainment and educational experiences across a range of platforms, traditional and new. The combination of cutting edge live action, amazing computer generated visual effects, state‐of‐the‐art 3‐D technology, Chopin’s timeless composing and Lang Lang’s kinetic piano playing, will create a truly moving and entertaining film for families of all ages.

The core iconic element across all delivery platforms is the flying machine itself. In the beginning nothing but a discarded piano, but when children discover it in moments of distress it transforms into something magical ‐ in the vein of Jules Verne and Hayao Miyazaki ‐ and transports them to a world without limits. It is the ultimate adventure den, and it will strike a chord with the imaginative child in each of us.

A metaphor for Chopin’s mesmerising and transporting music, the flying machine, like his music, will traverse Europe and the world. The audio, visual and cultural experience will have a transformative effect on people’s lives; flying into films, games and theatrical shows, onto the pages of books and the screens of mobiles, and into school curriculums. The Flying Machine is so distinctive it will win the hearts and spark the imagination of audiences all over the world.

We are breaking the mould with The Flying Machine. The sheer emotional impact and enjoyment of watching this unique film will make it a classic. Like Disney and Pixar’s most innovative films it is set to charm audiences through the generations.

- Hugh Welchman