Friday 25 January 2013

Loving Vincent's diary - 5th 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 - 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