A few years prior to the immersive experiences, filmmakers brought Vincent van Gogh's paintings to life in a completely new and different way. In 2017, Loving Vincent was a film made of oil paintings.

Today Vincent van Gogh is sort of the model we hold in our minds for a tortured artist. He saw little to no commercial success in his lifetime. He struggled with addiction and mental health. He lived on the fringes of society inspired by other artists and impoverishing himself in his drive to create. He was known to go without food at times because he was spending all of his money on paint. And now we can see his dramatic tale unfold through paint. A team of 125 artists from around the world produced 65,000 paintings to animate the film. Film and animation basically work off the principle that if you have a bunch of pictures played back really quickly it overwhelms the eye. The human eye can not process more than ten pictures or frames per second so it stops looking like a series of pictures and instead looks like one picture that is moving. For Loving Vincent, the artists created an oil painting on canvas for each of the 65,000 frames. They recreated some of his masterpieces telling the dramatic tale through his best known works, in his style and his preferred medium of oils. 

So how did they do all of this? Well, the storyboard for the movie included a number of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings. They recruited a team of 125 well-trained oil painters rather than traditional animators. A bit of the movie was made by rotoscoping which is a technique of basically drawing on top of a frame of film. Actors were filmed in front of a green screen. Editors made a composite shot replacing the green to put Vincent van Gogh’s paintings into the background. Now here is the tricky part. After the green screen and all that editing, they put every single frame of the film onto a canvas. It took six years, but they painted 65,000 frames on canvas. Today only about 1000 of the paintings remain because after a frame was painted and photographed for the film, they would typically re-use the canvas. Oil paints take a long time to dry so they would be able to make slight alterations to a wet painting for the next frame. It was a remarkable feat blending old and new media.

You can see the trailer for Loving Vincent on YouTube

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