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February 2018

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www.postmagazine.com 31 POST FEBRUARY 2018 Loving Vincent A Painterly Impression ARTISTS CREATE AN ANIMATED EXPLORATION OF VAN GOGH'S LAST DAYS USING HIS OWN PAINTINGS IN THIS OSCAR-NOMINATED FILM he title of the film Loving Vincent, which received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature, comes from the words "Your loving Vincent," which painter Vincent van Gogh typically used as a sign-off on letters to his brother. But it could as easily describe the feelings of filmmakers who created this homage to the artistic genius and, one imagines, of audiences who view the extraordinary animated feature film. It is arguably the world's first feature film created with oil paintings. You could, in fact, call Loving Vincent a stop-motion animated film. For this 90-minute exploration into the last year of van Gogh's life, painters produced 65,000 oil paintings on canvas; 12 paintings 2.5 feet high by 1.5 feet wide for each second of film. A total of 125 professional artists worked on the film in Poland and Greece. Their paintings include careful representations of 130 landscapes and portraits that van Gogh created during his last years in Arles and Auvers- sur-Oise, France. To put the paintings in motion, the artists repositioned the brushstrokes in one painting when creating the next. Each oil painting was then photographed with a digital camera and retouched as necessary using computer graphics software to create the final film. That's the simple explanation. The process of making this film extended over seven years; the first four years spent developing the meticulous tech- nique the crew would use, and the latter years filming live-action actors who would play people in van Gogh's portraits, and painting the 65,000 frames. BreakThru Films in Poland and the UK produced the film; Trademark Films in the UK was co-producer. The result immerses the viewer fully into van Gogh's world, a world in which the people van Gogh painted are now breathing, speaking characters, but always still living in the world that van Gogh saw and painted. For anyone who has gazed at a van Gogh painting and imagined that starry sky moving, BY BARBARA ROBERTSON T

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