Over 70 Artists Bring Van Gogh Paintings To Life Through A One-Of-Kind Animated Film
Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.—Vincent Van Gogh
This animated film is the first feature-length animated film made solely through hand-painted canvases. The film studio creating this masterpiece is the Oscar-winning studio BreakThru Films.
The overall concept of the film is a murder mystery about the life and death of Vincent van Gogh told through revealing interviews with the characters from van Gogh’s own paintings. Each character reads the various van Gogh letters and provides their understanding of what Vincent has written.
The film tries to look into the various theories on how Vincent really died and give credibility through the interpretation of his letters — and lets the viewer decide what they think really happened.
Vanity Fair published an article in November 2014 that featured a forensic scientist’s skeptical take on the possibility that van Gogh shot himself, due to the artist’s inability to hold the gun so close to his body and the absence of burn marks on his hands.
As pointed out in a book written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith released a book in 2011, called Van Gogh: The Life, which claimed that van Gogh did not commit suicide but rather a local teen bully murdered him.
Naifeh and Smith’s book; the gun was never found, the easel van Gogh claimed to be painting on was never recovered and the walk van Gogh claims to have taken from a wheat field to an inn where he was staying is unbelievably long for someone with a fatal wound (it was about a mile). Though speculative, the author’s also discuss van Gogh’s paintings around the time of his death as far too lighthearted and that van Gogh made it clear he was against suicide in various letters.
The timeframe of the film covers over 8 years of his life, conveyed through 860 of Vincent’s paintings, 1026 drawings, 800 letters, with 20 people (each of the characters) telling the story of van Gogh’s life.
A Few Facts On Van Gogh
- Vincent van Gogh died young at 37.
- He suffering years of frequent bouts of mental illness including the infamous episode where he sliced off part of his ear.
- He didn’t start painting until he was 27 or 28, and average about 2 paintings per week
- He sold only one painting during his lifetime.
- His works today carry multi-million dollar price tags.
Highlight Of The Film: Loving van Gogh
- Each second of film requires 12 key frames, which translates to 12 total paintings.
- The total length of the film will be 80-minutes and will require 56,000 key frames.
- There are 70 total artist working on recreating the exact replicas of the paintings in digital form.
- One artist can create on average six paintings a day, the equivalent of half a second of film.
- The scenes are first shot with actors in a studio, in western Poland, then the footage is traced and painted over in the style of the Post-Impressionist.
- Marlena Jopyk-Misiak, supervises the painstaking artwork of all 70 artist.
- The film should be finished by the end of 2015.
- The team is currently appealing to the public on Kickstarter to help raise funds to complete the movie.
To donate to this film click here or to visit them on Facebook click here.
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Joanna Maleszyk hangs up recreations of Vincent van Gogh paintings.
A painter recreates a Vincent van Gogh self-portrait at a film studio in the northern Polish city of Gdansk on December 5, 2014.
Painting stations exist for each of the 70 artists re-creating the animated paintings for the film.
