Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/941133
www.postmagazine.com 33 POST FEBRUARY 2018 LOVING VINCENT non-existent paintings, thinking how would he have painted them." Working from storyboards, the artists created digital matte paintings for the black-and-white scenes, the flashbacks often based on photographs and developed an animation style for those. For scenes in color, which would look like van Gogh paintings, they created a digital image to s et up color and composition. From that reference, they produced oil paintings that would be used as reference keyframes for other painters to follow. All told, design painters spent a year re-imag- ining 125 of van Gogh's paintings to fit into the story and into the size and shape of a film frame. Ninety-four of van Gogh's paintings remained close to the originals; 31 were altered in some way. A character painted in one style might have ap- peared in another painting in a different style, for example. Or, paintings in one season or time of day needed to change to follow the story. "The backgrounds weren't so difficult to do," Dominiak says. "The main problem was the char- acters. The keyframes were based on one original van Gogh painting. But what if we wanted Armand at night? We had to imagine what that would look like." And, they had to do so with the actors' fea- tures in mind, as well, not just the original subjects. All told, the design painters created 377 oil paintings, none of which appear in the film. The painters spent approximately five days creating each painting. "Once we had those physical paintings, we distributed them in digital form for the painters creating the final oil paintings to use as reference," Dominiak says. To find the final group of 125 with the right combination of artistic and animation skills, BreakThru interviewed thousands of painters. Even so, the studio had these painting animators complete a 180-hour training program before starting on the project. "There aren't many painters or animators who can do painted stop motion where every single frame is painted and photographed," says Tomek Wochniak, production manager. Frame By Frame In Oil While the design painters were creating digital matte paintings and keyframes, the directors had the live-action footage cut and edited into the footage that the artists would paint over, frame by frame, in oils on canvas. "The live-action footage was not ready to repaint just like that, though," Dominiak says. "We needed to do digital processing first before projecting it onto a canvas." The visual effects team composited the live- action footage with photos of the keyframe paint- ings, and added CG animation to give the back- ground images movement and depth — a steam train rolling past a field of grain, flying crows and blowing leaves, for example. To minimize unintended changes from one painting to the next, to ensure as consistent light- ing as possible, and to facilitate each painter's task, the team devised a painting animation work- station system they dubbed PAWS, and installed 97 systems in the Gdańsk and Wrocław, Poland, and Athens, Greece, studios. "The idea of creating PAWS was to give the painters a chance to paint more efficiently and quickly," Wochniak says. "We had done Little Postman in a painted style, and every single thing that moved had to be fixed in post production. The painters had to remember to turn lights off and on, hide the projector, not to kick the tripod, and so forth. So for this film, we constructed a simple workstation with a computer and software. The painters have a dedicated small area where there is no light from the outside." Each painter sits in front of a table angled at 45 degrees, with a monitor above. Over the paint- er's head are a projector and camera. Projected onto the painter's canvas frame by frame are the live-action composites. Managing the projection and providing frame-based editing and drawing tools is DZED Systems' Dragonframe stop-motion anima- tion software. "For the black-and-white frames, the artists traced the movement in the live-action footage," Wochniak says. "They did rotoscoping." For the color frames, however, which comprise the majority of the film, the painters used the pro- jected reference material only as a guide. They had to re-create the image in van Gogh's style with brushstrokes. "From the keyframe and live-action footage composited onto the canvas, the painters create a new oil painting and then photograph it with the digital camera," Dominiak explains. "Once it is photographed, they scratch off the parts of the painting that move into a different position, and repaint it. Then, take another photo. And so on. With static camera shots, only a character's face is repainted; the background is still. But if the camera is moving, the painter has to scratch the whole frame and paint it again." The painters did this 12 times for each second of film. POST The artists photographed each painting with a Canon D20 digital camera at 6K resolution. BreakThru's three visual effects artists then went to work refining the images while maintaining the quality of the paintings. They used Canon's internal RAW converter to move the photograph into the JPEG format, and The Foundry's Nuke to stabilize the images to avoid flickering and to fix distortions. "The projected images weren't perfect rectan- gles," says head of VFX, Lukasz Mackiewicz. "So we had to fix all the shots." Adobe's After Effects helped the visual effects artists remove dirt and specks, tone down heavy specular light on the edges of brushstrokes and fix too-rapid changes in paint tones. Each second of film was created through 12 paintings.