05/06/2024 - The British filmmaker and one half of the filmmaking duo behind Loving Vincent and The Peasants held an engaging and eye-opening masterclass at Anifilm

On the screen, painted characters spin in the revel of wedding music, faster and faster, engrossing the viewer in the scene like a whirlwind. On the stage in front of the screen at Grandhotel Zlatý Lev in Liberec stands Hugh Welchman, a British filmmaker and one-half of the duo behind Loving Vincent [+see also:
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interview: Dorota Kobiela
film profile] and The Peasants [+see also:
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film profile], watching the scene with pure excitement despite all the struggles encountered during the production of the latter. “Already on Loving Vincent, we invented the slowest form of animation anyone’s ever come up with so far,” he said. “And then we made it twice as hard.”

“It’s this crazy, stupid, ridiculous idea to paint a film,” he added with a disarmingly frank smile. At his masterclass at this year’s Anifilm in Liberec, Welchman, who was also part of the International Feature Film Competition jury, walked the audience through the inspirations and creative process behind the two oil-painted films he made with his wife, Dorota Kobiela.

It took four years to get the financing for Loving Vincent and three to actually make it. The spectacular opening shot, starting with Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and tracking all the way down to a cheap bar, took eighteen months and three painters to finish. The film got an Academy Award nomination and over twenty audience prizes, grossing over $40 million at the box office against its $5.5 million budget, which made it one of the most successful Polish films and adult animation features. And it was just a prelude to what turned out to be the real challenge.

On Loving Vincent, “everything went exactly to plan,” Welchman said. “On The Peasants, nothing did.”

Difficulties with realism

It was Kobiela who came up with the idea to make The Peasants while working on Loving Vincent. Revisiting the classic novel by Władysław Reymont set in a small Polish village at the turn of the 20^th century, it struck her that the writing style is “like someone’s painting a story in front of your mind,” as Welchman put it.

Although the source material focuses on the whole community, Welchman explained that there is “this story of love and passion that goes through the book, and we knew we wanted to have that as our main story.” This is why he and Kobiela decided to make Jagna (Kamila Urzędowska), a young woman determined to forge her own path, the protagonist.

Discussing where the inspiration came from, Welchman proved his vast knowledge of the topic and showed the extensive tables filled with paintings to quote in the film and colour schemes to use. Emulating Polish masters, many different paintings were used to create the design art.

“The wedding scene was very complicated as there were lots of small faces. Jagna had this dress with a huge amount of details on it, completely covered in sequins,” Welchman recalled. “But the way the painters did it was a much more expressionistic-like approach to how to show it.”

This is why the lead painters’ job on the film was to paint it first to show the rest of the artists - over a hundred of them - how it needed to be done, basically coming up with their own paintings inspired by the Polish masters.

Welchman extensively used the Loving Vincent production as a comparison for everything that had to be done differently in The Peasants. The original storyboard was discarded, and dynamic shots were used which then were translated into motion blur on canvas - “which painters love because they can paint faster,” Welchman laughed. 

However, a difficulty for the painters was the realistic style as opposed to the expressionism of Loving Vincent. They thought The Peasants would take about 30% longer to paint than their first film because of the style, but “it turned out to be 100% longer,” Welchman revealed. They tried multilayering, but it didn’t save any time, and then shifted from doing twelve frames per second to six and employing digital in-betweening - using the middle frames of the oil paintings as the main ones, and digitally filling those between them.

“Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t hire more painters because we couldn’t find more of them with the skillset high enough for the realism style,” Welchman admitted. There was also an initial problem with artists refusing to paint Jagna due to Urzędowska’s symmetrical features, making it difficult to repeat perfectly in each frame. Brushes with just a single hair were used for the eyelashes.

COVID and Ukraine war

All the paintings were created in four studios established specifically for production in Poland, Serbia, Lithuania, and Ukraine. However, the studio in Kyiv had to be temporarily closed due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Once it reopened, there were moments when very little work could be done because of the power cuts. Loving Vincent helped with that, as a generator was bought after selling some of the paintings from it. But the silver lining was that the Ukrainian painters who came to Poland agreed to paint Jagna. 

Before the canvas, there was a live-action reference shooting done in the studio, mostly on the green screen, using cardboard sets. As quick and efficient as it sounded at first, described by Welchman, the shooting got delayed, too.

“The big wedding scene? It got everyone in a tiny room, and everyone got COVID,” he recalled. The production was shut down twice because of the virus, the second time for a whole year. With Kobiela being sick, Welchman also had to step up as the sole director. 

Kobiela worried The Peasants was “too Polish”. The film did exceptionally well at home, in Lithuania, and, for some reason, in Iceland, and got great reviews at international festivals. “Unfortunately, it didn’t do so well in other countries, so maybe my wife was right,” Welchman said jokingly.

So, was it worth it? All the stress of the exhausting “living from month to month just to try to pay people and to get it done?” he wondered.

Upcoming projects

The director suggested the answer was yes by revealing upcoming projects. A ten-minute documentary about Leonardo da Vinci is in the works, reconstructing his style, “which is even harder than realism”. He also mentioned a painted animation horror film based on Francisco Goya’s paintings, which made the audience particularly excited.

Another oil-painting animation project for Welchman and Kubiela is set in Africa 14,000 years ago with a painting style based upon cave drawings, the earliest art humans ever made. 

On top of it all, they are planning to make an adaptation of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night's Dream”, “Set it in a fairy forest, a dark one but with a lot of funny games and romance,” Welchman mused.

Welchman also teased that it seemed that whatever the topic was in his films, it would then repeat in real life. With Loving Vincent, it was the whole journey about the love of art, adventure, and doing something new. With The Peasants - conflict and drama. “It was hell,” he sighs theatrically, hinting he thoroughly enjoyed it. “Onto the next film.”