The Making of the First Ever Fully Painted Feature Film “Loving Vincent” | Hacker News Reader

The Making of the First Ever Fully Painted Feature Film “Loving Vincent”

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135 pointsthunderbong55 comments

Forget the way that his paintings now decorate the front of chocolate-boxes, Van Gogh was one of the most hard-core artists who has ever lived. His relentless pursuit of 'vérité' drove his to some obsessive extremes.

- As a youngish man, he married a worn-out, alcoholic, middle-aged prostitute. It was she that likely gave him syphilis that in the end drove him insane. She eventually committed suicide.

- He was rejected from the priesthood for being a zealot.

- He started a simultaneous translation of the bible from Latin to English, German and French.

- On many occasions, attempting to create a spiritual union with the working class, he gave up his comfortable middle-class life to live a life of unreal austerity. This is where his painting 'The Potato Eaters' comes from.

- Even his own father wanted to commit him to a lunatic asylum.

He was also, quite frankly, very poorly gifted as an artist. Doubt me? Check out this drawing done when he was 27 (my 19 yo students can draw better): https://www.incredibleart.org/lessons/drama/carpenter.jpg

However, he was also uniquely bloody-minded and eventually found his own way of doing things which was crafted from diverse sources (impressionism, Japanese wood block prints, Dutch genre painting etc). Contributing to this was the atelier system, which was an art school system located away from the establishment.

If he had been born post 1960, he would have been another GG Allin.

What does "hard-core" mean in this context? Because from what you write down I can only see a miserable life heavily influenced by mental illness.

I guess it means... committing to a self-destructive life in order to serve a creative vision: 'Dive deep, come up wealthy'. Its not the only way for a creative individual to function, but I could easily list many from the top of my head without even breaking sweat.

From a broader perspective, it is an application of a 'limit case' technique: by mapping the limits one defines the whole.

Love the connection there! Gotta witness the breakdown to find the true boundaries.

He was also quite prolific. His output is insane for the short number of years he was active. And it’s all very high quality for the most part.

He was an artist who got shit done.

That is a good point. His 'a la prima' technique was crafted to produce quick results that either succeed or failed: quality via quantity. Typically, his paintings took one or two days to produce.

Yeah, he'd probably be impressed with Bob Ross' technique.

> As a youngish man, he married a worn-out, alcoholic, middle-aged prostitute.

She was three years older than him at most and they were not married.

I stand corrected. However the drawings of her indicate a woman who is prematurely broken by life. Google 'Sorrow' by Van Gogh... that is her. Compare that to Van G's self portraits done at the same time.

> a woman who is prematurely broken by life

Is this painting of a girl with her head on her arms and knees [1] your understanding of being "prematurely broken by life"?

[1] https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/p0002V1962

A girl?

That looks like a painting of a geriatric.

Yep. That's the one.

You are being surprisingly hard on his natural talent. I once saw a drawing he did and was blown away by it, only to discover he was something like 12 or 14 when he did it.

> He was also, quite frankly, very poorly gifted as an artist. Doubt me? Check out this drawing done when he was 27 (my 19 yo students can draw better)

Come on. While your students might be able to draw better than Vincent, they are very very likely not even close to being able to create the incredible art he has made.

If you haven't been to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, you should go and compare against your students' work (or, against many many artists, for that matter).

I agree. That is actually the point I was making... differentiating Being a capable painter/draftsman from being a capable artist.

Check out Mary Casset... A great technician but a meh artist compared to Renoir who had a tenth the skill but ten times the soul.

Cassatt.

I don't know. I do not dislike Van Gogh, and his life certainly was colourful. To me, when I think of Van Gogh, more than any intrinsically gifted artist (I think this of Dalí, for instance) I think of the time that chose him.

He was ignored all his life and only later he was a hero of individuality. The romantic idea of a struggling artist. I am not saying technically it was not interesting (maybe the materic painting comes from something like his thick paint technique) but Goya, for example, could claim similar things.

Overall, I think it is the best example of a struggling artist where the story of his life matters more than the paintings. I hope it does not seem insensitive.

I saw this film at a cinema, but I have to say it’s quite disappointing.

It’s an impressive feat, yes, and at many points it looks really beautiful. But there are other points where the oil paintings are (understandably!) rushed, and the story is very thin.

Overall, I was far more impressed by “Across the Spider-Verse”. I’d be amazed if any animator can watch that and not think “Yes!! That’s it! This is the future of my profession!”

> I’d be amazed if any animator can watch that and not think “Yes!! That’s it! This is the future of my profession!”

I'm sure that Hayao Miyazaki is utterly unimpressed by across the spider-verse.

Probably not _utterly_ unimpressed... but OK, yes, any animator but one. :)

why do you think so?

To go a little bit further on this argument: I was dissapointed because the whole point of making this film turned out to be for nothing.

Instead of animation, it felt to me like just a live action film with a fiter. Sure, the filter in this case took many man-hours to produce, and as stills felt pretty, but there was something vital missing.

I found this hard to put into words, but here goes:

Actual animation thinks about how to present perspective, movement, character, etc. This film chose to paint over moving pictures, and in that way literally took over all the 'real' visual elements without making any choices in them. Compared to almost any anime, it feels lifeless and an under-use of the medium, IMO.

Right, it's almost entirely rotoscoping. I don't think that makes it intrinsically bad or less worthy -- e.g. "A Scanner Darkly" is rotoscoped and I thought that was terrific.

But in this case I totally agree, they didn't add anything beyond the one big gimmick.

It's all about the story. Does the style used serves the story?

It would be much simpler to experiment with such a film about Van Gogh today with the help of machine learning. But the story has to live up to the visuals. Art and story must complement each other in a way that makes the style use undeniable, not just a gimmick.

I saw it too. I found that the hand painting process resulted in every pixel of frame constantly changing, even otherwise plain backgrounds, which made it exhausting to watch. The frame rate was pretty low too.

Agreed, was also disappointed. Apart from a poorly constructed shallow story, the black and white parts were quite off-putting. The whole point of this film was playful van Gogh-esque colors and his signature strokes. Whose idea was it to have oil on canvas in black and white, for whatever purpose (flashbacks - whatever)? Incredibly bad idea.

> Whose idea was it to have oil on canvas in black and white, for whatever purpose (flashbacks - whatever)?

Budget, most likely.

I disagree If found it most impressive

I actually knew some people involved in the animation personally and.. um yeah. It really was a bit rushed and cobbled together from what I understood.

The creators and producers didn’t have anything specific to say about Van Gogh nor had any reason to. It was a straightforward gamble that this would sell, and it worked. They rode on low-cost high-skill technical talent to pull it off.

Aw man, I’m sorry to hear that. Especially as so much of the artwork really is very good -- it deserves a much better showcase.

It’s the artistic equivalent of a really cool tech demo without any useful product behind it.

>The film is comprised of over 65,000 frames entirely made up of oil paintings, with 12 individually painted frames appearing on screen per second. Considering that every brushstroke tells a story, it’s crazy to think that there are 898 shots — hence 898 oil paintings — in the hour-and-a-half long moving picture.

This leaves some uncertainty as to how many physical paintings were actually used as frames in the film. For what it's worth, it seems like most frames were created digitally.

If I recall correctly (from 2017 coverage), those paintings were painted over for each frame of the movie.

So those 898 oil paintings are with the final image of a given shot.

It is also obvious just looking at the movie that animation was created by painting on top of parts of the previous frame.

Some scenes appear to be fully repainted between frames.

I also assumed every single frame was fully painted (but also thought why, crazy effort.. why not just do it with overlays like the classic cartoonists?)

So still, impressive effort.. but still "first ever painted": What is the difference to classic cartoonists? Just the technique that we call this painting, and cartoonists just drawing, or the more complex pictures, or what else?

My understanding is that they make the distinction on this being painted on canvas and not cells.

But things like Snow White was of course colored using brushes, so it would be reasonable to refer to them as painted as well, although we usually call them “drawn”

That was my first thought. Until Beauty and the Beast all animated features were “fully painted”.

It seems like they’re trying to make a distinction in their technique, but I’m not sure it really matters.

Synthetik Studio Artist (https://synthetik.com/) is capable of creating similar painterly animations.

Example: https://synthetik.com/player-embed/id/176925/

I hesitate to say "more easily", because maybe I'm missing something vital from the art in the trailer, but... Studio Artist is awesome!

I feel compelled to mention here the 1987 film "The Man Who Planted Trees", which is essentially a 30 minute minute long animated painting with a story. Blew my mind when I first saw it.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093488/

Also interesting is the 1999 animated short film (20 min), "The Old Man and the Sea" (based on Hemingway's novel). Subtle fingertips moved around oil paint on glass.

  [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Man_and_the_Sea_(1999_film)
  [1]: https://youtu.be/W5ih1IRIRxI

Why is nearly every comment here downplaying this? I don’t know if this is great cinema but it’s definitely original and a stunning achievement. It’s like climbing a mountain or running a marathon: the difficulty is the point.

>but it’s definitely original and a stunning achievement.

Is it? What about Pinocchio?

Boyhood took 12 years to make, but no one likes it.

The Werner Herzog movie where they moved a steam boat over a mountain (Fitzcarraldo) was incredibly difficult, but most people haven't seen it.

Difficulty can't be the point - it has to be a movie first, if you want to keep people's interest

I loved Boyhood, one of my favorites.

Fitzcarraldo is one of the better movies I’ve ever seen and the production was so famously difficult they made a documentary about it.

I mean it's a stunning achievement in the same way counting out loud to a million is, but it doesn't necessarily mean I think it was a good use of time in the context of making a movie.

The difficulty alone isn’t the point, judging by the rhetoric from the filmmakers themselves.

It’s meant to be an homage to Van Gogh, but it doesn’t actually have anything interesting to say about him or his work.

Not to be pedantic, but aren't the Studio Ghibli movies painted as well? They use(used?) poster paint for most of their movies (spirited Away, Princess mononoke, etc).

This is neat anyhoot!

The animated elements are line drawings. The drawings are transferred to transparent sheets, and the shapes between the lines are then colored in with paint on the back side (so as to not overpaint the lines). You wouldn’t call the result a painting. Background art is often painted.

Look up “cel animation”.

Thank you! My misunderstanding, I had forgotten cell shading.

> You wouldn’t call the result a painting.

I don't see why not. The backgrounds are painted. Other things that move get outlined first (something painters do all the time on canvas) and then, as you say, are also painted.

These paintings are then composited together to make a single frame, but it's still all just paintings.

You could argue that for it to count each frame would have to be a single painting, but then I'd argue that rotoscoping entire frames of film would also count. Undone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undone_(TV_series)) might count as well. It's rotoscoping placed over oil painted backgrounds.

Also of note as another film using Van Gogh paintings: The "Crows", from 1990's Dreams movie by Akira Kurosawa (Seven Samurai, Yojimbo).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKSUpyENtwo

From wikipedia: "In "Crows", Vincent van Gogh is portrayed by American filmmaker Martin Scorsese.[8] The segment features Prelude No. 15 in D-flat major ("Raindrop") by Chopin. The visual effects for this segment were provided by George Lucas and his special effects group Industrial Light & Magic. Additionally, it is the only segment in the film wherein the characters do not speak Japanese, but instead English and French."

I want to take computer-generated math animation, and transform it to look as if I hand drew every frame. This must be within the reach of consumer AI by now? I'll be happy to hand draw a large training set. Otherwise I don't know where to start.

There are have long been musicians in the digital realm who develop their own tools. Visual arts should be ripe to similarly explode, with interactive content for VR headsets an emerging genre.

We could accelerate this evolution, by teaching artists the tools that are ready now.

Reading through the bit about all the painted frames it feels like the author has never heard about animated movies.

The problem is this looks like a stable diffusion filter over a video

FWIW, coming from someone unfamiliar with Van Gogh's biography, this film was the first time I heard of the (conspiracy?) theory that his death was accidental and not a suicide.

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