Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/941133
www.postmagazine.com 34 POST FEBRUARY 2018 LOVING VINCENT Loving Vincent Brushstrokes Vincent van Gogh decided to become an artist at age 28. He died at age 37. Van Gogh cut off his ear in 1888 after a fight with his artist friend Paul Gauguin, who was living with him in Arles at the Yellow House. While in Arles, van Gogh completed nearly 200 paintings in 15 months, many of which are now among his most recognizable images today. Director Dorota Kobiela and co-director Hugh Welchman read 40 publications about Vincent van Gogh and visited 19 museums in six countries to view approximately 400 of his paintings. Many direct quotes from Vincent van Gogh's 800 letters are in the film. 5,000 artists applied to work on Loving Vincent; 125 made the grade. A Kickstarter campaign launched in 2014 funded part of the painters' training. The painters used 6,500 tubes and 1,300 liters of Royal Talens paint to make the movie. The filmmakers made Loving Vincent in the Academy ratio because it is close to the composition of most van Gogh paintings. Artists painted each frame of the film in oil on a 67cm x 49cm canvas – 12 frames per second of film. The opening shot of the film, which descends through van Gogh's "The Starry Night," contains over 600 paintings. Three painters took a combined total of 14 months to paint that shot. Director Dorota Kobiela was named one of Variety's 10 Animators to Watch in 2017. "The painters didn't always sit in the same position, so that would create a slight flicker, especially in the dark scenes, and sometimes the lights would get dimmer," says Mackiewicz. "We might have left minor issues, but when we made a decision to improve one image, the rest stood out. We were lucky that After Effects' Refine Soft Matte handled and interpreted the brushstrokes the way it did. "At the beginning, we thought we wouldn't be able to remove dirt or fix a background," he adds. "It would have been too tedious. After Effects sped up our work by 30 times. At the beginning, we thought only 10 percent would be [fixed in] post. At the end, only 10 percent wasn't. We did things at the end we didn't conceive of at the beginning." Of course, that might be said for the entire proj- ect, which began as an idea for a short film to be painted by one artist, director Dorota Kobiela, and grew to become the remarkable Loving Vincent. Barbara Robertson (BarbaraRR@comcast.net) is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for Post's sister publication, CGW. A Canon D20 camera captured imagery at 6K resolution.