Sunday 24 February 2013

Loving Vincent's diary - 7th week (Oscar night)



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 - 7th week (Oscar night)


Well today is the 5th anniversary of the night I won an Oscar. So I thought I would write a blog on the Oscars. I warn you there is not much Vincent content in this one… He’ll be back to centre stage in the next one!

The Oscars meant very little to me before 2008. Peter and the Wolf was the first one of my films that I actually submitted to the Oscars.

At film school all the people around me where very focused on Cannes, that was seen as the prestige event, and for animators it was Annecy. The Oscars was this distant American thing that seemed to get everyone excited. I remember promising one of my friends, who had just done well with his internet start-up, and who invested in Peter and the Wolf, that we would of course win the Oscar, not really thinking it was that big of a deal. When we were nominated then I noticed it was a big deal. All of a sudden I was getting 100’s of emails a day, from people I knew and from people I didn’t. This would culminate on the day after winning when I received 3,000 emails in 24 hours.

Two weeks before the Oscars I travelled out to California, and we went on a tour showing all of the Oscar nominated short films at the studios: Pixar, Disney, DreamWorks, ILM, Sony Pictures. There was a lot of hanging around, a lot of playing table tennis. Table tennis is big among animators on the west coast it seems. I arrived at one studio, Disney I think, and a guy came up to me and asked me if I was the producer of Peter and the Wolf. I was flattered that he had heard of the film, and that he was fan enough to seek me out. But it turned out his friend from DreamWorks had called ahead and said that I played a mean game of table tennis, and he was the studio no.1 and wanted to challenge me! I was also hanging out with all the other nominees and got to see their films many times. I was confident that we were the front-runner. There was another stop-motion, Madame Tutli-Putli, which had startling technique of combining real eyes with stop motion puppets, but that’s all I remember about the film, I don’t really recall the film, it was kind of a one trick pony. There was a half hour painting-animation melodrama from Petrov, My Love, which I did love, but I felt it was too melodramatic for most tastes. There was a lovely CG French film about pigeons, but not significant enough in style or story to challenge, and then there was ‘Where was the Walrus’ and innovative film about John Lennon. I thought this had an outside chance, but Peter and the Wolf had story, charm, humour and style, so quite honestly I expected my name to be called out.

The Oscars, appropriately, takes place in a shopping mall. Yet this pedestrian precinct is covered with red velvet, tacked on, stapled in, giant gold statues made of plastic are rolled in, and the venue is transformed. And once you see all the starlets and stars walking down the sidewalk, now a glistening red carpet, and under the glare of the lights and the flashlights, tinsel town comes to glamorous life. I walked down the catwalk next to George Clooney and Halle Berry. You can imagine that there weren’t many bulbs flashing in my direction. However as I had the foresight to smuggle in my Peter puppet we did get some attention. People like dolls.

When my name was called out, even though I expected it, I had a huge feeling of elation. Also relief. I had promised people this, and by the time it came to the Oscars I realised that this prize is by far and away considered the greatest prize you can win in film, and it is not something I should have promised! But, it worked out. And over the next few weeks I learnt just how highly the world regards the Oscars, and what store they set by it. I think with Loving Vincent we will have a chance at being nominated for Best Feature Animation. This category is dominated by Disney and Pixar with films normally made for around $200m, 20 times the budget we will have, but I think if we make an involving story, as well as having the most stunning visual style, that we can stand a chance. In the year I went up with Peter and the Wolf we were the favourites, if we get to be there with Loving Vincent we will be the plucky little underdogs, that has a Vincent-esque feel to it. He was the insider (in the art world) who was always the outsider. As someone who has won one Oscar I guess I am on one level an insider, but I live in Northern Poland far away from the Movie industry, and I engage in projects that attract the labels of ‘artistic’ within the industry. I don’t have any friends who are agents or actors, I don’t know any people who work at the studios, it still feels like another world that happens somewhere else, I still feel an outsider.

I will be fast asleep by the time the Oscars get announced tonight. But I predict that it will be a clean sweep for Disney. Wreck it Ralph and Frankenweenie are superior films to Brave (beautiful look but a weak and derivative story by Pixar’s groundbreaking standards); Paranorman and Pirates (for me the weakest stop motion film ever to come out of the wonderful Aardman Animation studio). This year there are only studio films in the mix, but interestingly three out of the five are stop-motion. For me Frankenweenie is Tim Burton’s best film since Edward Scissorhands. I am not a huge fan of his style, but the girl with her cat, and the science teacher are brilliant, the film gets a bit OTT at the end, but definitely a success. And much as I hate films that have inane content – a film about computer games????- I was blown away by the entertainment value of Wreck it Ralph- incredible inventive directing- why can’t they just use that awesome directing skill, technical brilliance and general film making mastery to tell stories that are about something that matters?

In the Short Animation category I hope Disney’s Paperman wins. The style is amazing, and the animation is really great. It fell down a bit as a story in the last third, but it was a pleasure to watch (especially in 3D). Wow if Paperman and Frankenweenie win it will be not only a double for Disney, but also a double for Black and White! The other shorts… Fresh Guacamole (no idea how this got nominated); Maggie Simpson short (not the Simpson’s finest hour- shouldn’t win); Adam and Dog (a few nice images at the start, but atmosphere doesn’t make up for the boredom, shocked that it was nominated) and finally Head over Heels from my old school, National Film and Television School. This is a very clever idea, and an epic achievement for a graduation film, but they puppet design is poor, and really they should have told the story in 6 minutes, not 11 minutes, it would have more impact. Still half of my sleeping brain will be rooting for them- to win an Oscar with your student film, that’d be something.

At the moment I tend to watch feature length documentaries, particularly biopics, because it fits with the story work we are doing for Loving Vincent. However it was refreshing over the past couple of days to watch all of the animation nominees. Refreshing but not inspiring, with the exception of Paperman there was nothing visually fresh or exciting.

Animation, despite representing films that go toe to toe with any blockbusters (Pixar/Disney far outrank any other studio in blockbusters and profitability) at the Oscars is still a sideshow compared to live action. By the time the animation winners are getting their rare chance to mix it up at parties with the Hollywood glamour set (an Oscar gets you into any party in LA tonight), the red-carpets will be already rolled up and the shopping mall will be restored, and I will be setting out on my 15km morning run through fresh snow to our big empty studio… which will someday soon start to be filled with painters…. And after they paint 56,800 paintings, over the next 2 years, then maybe Loving Vincent will also be a Cinderella for one night, propelled briefly into the West Coast lime light of Tinsel Town.
by Hugh Welchman



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