Vincent van Gogh turned his tortured soul into paintings of beauty and passion that revolutionised people’s understanding of what art could be.
So it may be apt that makers of the first fully painted film — an animation about the artist’s life — have found that their idea is proving agonising for them too. Loving Vincent was meant to last just a few minutes, but ambition overtook the Anglo-Polish team, who have had to recruit 85 oil painters to produce 62,450 works.
Hugh Welchman, an Oscar-winning animator from Bracknell in Berkshire, is now in his fourth year on the project, which will star Saoirse Ronan and Chris O’Dowd as subjects of Van Gogh paintings brought to life on screen.
“I very much have invented the slowest form of mass animation,” Welchman said. A trailer for the film designed to recruit artists went viral this week and was watched 35 million times.
“Each frame is an oil painting on canvas so it’s a very laborious process.
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“I’ve done quite a lot of animation so I went into it with my eyes open, but even I was shocked. Nothing like this has ever been set up for a feature animation.”
He found that professional animators did not have the necessary skill to recreate Van Gogh’s works so found oil painters with five years of training and sent them on a six-week “crash course” in animation.
The painters were used to working alone but had to learn to work alongside dozens of colleagues in a warehouse in Warsaw. “Getting the painters on board has been a much better experience than I expected it to be,” Welchman said.
“There has been the least amount of ego and a greater team spirit than any other film I’ve made.”
He said that he and Dorota Kobiela, the director, had intended for the project to be a short film until he visited the Royal Academy in London in 2010 for an exhibition of Van Gogh’s letters.
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“There was a queue for four hours to get in to see it. I was taken aback that people would queue for that long. I thought, maybe it would be worth going through the difficult production process and do a feature-length film.”
Welchman’s Oscar, which he won in 2008 for the short animated film Peter & the Wolf, helped to attract star names including Ronan, the Irish actress recently nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Brooklyn.
She will play Marguerite Gachet, whom Van Gogh painted at the piano while he was being treated by her father, Dr Paul Gachet. Jerome Flynn, who is best known for his appearance in Game of Thrones, will play Dr Gachet, a portrait of whom was once the world’s most expensive painting when it sold for $82.5 million in 1990.
Other cast members include O’Dowd as Postman Roulin, Helen McCrory as Dr Gachet’s housekeeper and John Sessions as Père Tanguy, Van Gogh’s supplier of art materials. Aidan Turner and Eleanor Tomlinson, who are best known for portraying the leading roles in the BBC adaptation of Poldark, also star.
Ronan said that she took the part because she had never known anything like it before. “I was really interested to see what the process was going to be because I knew that we were all going to be turned into Van Gogh style paintings but I didn’t quite know how you guys were going to go about doing that,” she said.
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Although each frame is a painting based on a Van Gogh original, the characters resemble the actors who play them. Each scene begins with the actors’ performance on a set, usually in front of green screens so that backgrounds can be added later.
The footage is then given to an artist, who paints the first frame of the scene on to a canvas 67cm by 49cm, which is similar to Van Gogh’s preferred canvas size. The artist takes a high-resolution image of the canvas and then advances the footage by a twelfth of a second so he can adjust the painting to match the next frame.
By the end of the film there will be about 1,000 canvases, each of which will have been repainted dozens of times. They will either be given to donors who helped to fund the project, which raised £70,000 through an online crowdfunding campaign, or form part of a travelling exhibition.
The film began as a documentary-style series of interviews but has now become a story that is fictional but uses real characters and incidents documented in Van Gogh’s letters. “Some of our characters are very much based on historical evidence and others are as we want them to be,” Welchman said.
The story is set a year after Van Gogh’s death, when Postman Roulin sends his son Armand to Paris to deliver a letter to the artist’s brother Theo.
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Armand finds that Theo has also died and continues his journey by tracking down people who have sat for the artist.
Welchman estimates that the film will be finished by August in time for release in October or November, although he has not yet sold the rights in Britain.
“What drew me in was Van Gogh’s story,” Welchman said. “He failed miserably at three professions and had a severe breakdown. He hadn’t done anything more than very rudimentary drawings in childhood but he decided to paint and ended up revolutionising modern art. He forced himself to become the peerless artist that he is. You can feel that passion and desire coming through in his work, which is why people like him. He achieves what he wanted to do — to communicate with people — in his painting that he failed to do in the flesh.”