As I recently mentioned (in my latest blog, about the museum show “Ink Tributes” by Marlon West) I’m going to include blog posts about new films, animation and film art news, and other subjects that are not about art in ArtInsights. I’m hoping these (fascinating!) posts will have you coming back when you ARE looking for art. In the meantime, let me tell you about the new film The Peasants, by the filmmaking wife and husband duo DK and Hugh Welchman, who brought the Oscar-nominated film Loving Vincent.
Here’s the trailer for the movie, so you get a sense of what it looks like, and why it’s a big deal:
Before I get into all of this, I want to tell you why you want to read the whole article:
FIRST: the story of this production includes these filmmakers literally saving artists..they were working on The Peasants in the recently opened studio in Kyiv, Ukraine, when Russia invaded and started an unprovoked war. DK, Hugh and all the folks at BreakThru (the production company making The Peasants) had to get the artists out of the country, and they did. You can read all about their rescue in The Guardian newspaper HERE.
SECOND: as with Loving Vincent, art from The Peasants is available for purchase, and DK and Hugh gave me a discount code for readers of this blog, in case they want to buy any of the oil paintings created for the movie. The art is going fast, especially the art priced at $250 and $500 — although so far they’ve been adding more art every few days… (and yeah, we’re talking about oil paintings that are around 20 x 26 inches, so that’s quite a deal for production art from such a gorgeous and inventive film)…you can see all the art for sale HERE.
You can read my 5-star review of The Peasants on the Alliance of Women Film Journalists site HERE.
Now. On with the blog:
Loving Vincent featured an animation technique in which live action is filmed, then oil paintings are created based on that footage. It was a way of celebrating the art and live of Vincent Van Gogh, and was appropriately lauded for its laborious yet gorgeous style. I interviewed them about the movie for the AWFJ, and you can read it HERE.
A more technical explanation, taken from their press notes:
“The over 100 painting animators who worked on the film did so on specially designed PAWS units (Painting Animation Work Stations), which Breakthru developed for Loving Vincent, in four studios in Poland, Serbia, Lithuania, and Ukraine. The experienced film crew shot live action footage, then footage from the live-action shoot becomes the reference footage for the painting animators. They then use this reference footage and paint over this with reference to the style (brushstrokes, colors, level of detail) set by the design paintings to paint the first frame of their shot on canvas, sized 67cm by 49cm. They then animate the shot by painting the subsequent keyframe, matching the brushstrokes, color, and impasto of their previous frame, for all parts of the shot that are moving. At the end, they are left with a painting of the last frame of the shot. Each frame is recorded with a Canon 6D digital stills camera at 6k resolution.
The keyframes created by the oil painting animators are then sent to the in-betweening process, which takes the style and brushstrokes of the original oil paintings and adds some digital brushstrokes to come up with the inbetweened frames. The amount of oil painting done per shot varied from every frame to every 4 frames at 12 frames per second.”
Yeah, that’s pretty technical. Suffice to say, Film is shot, then artists make paintings of that footage. Here’s a video of the making of the movie:
Just when you think animation can’t be any more technically complicated and time-consuming….
Most of the artists hired as painters for the film were women, and 30% of them were working in Ukraine, so not only did the pandemic cause problems for the production, so too did the war. Once Kyiv was secured, they re-opened their studio there, but bombing was so constant, they lost electricity. Hugh Welchman started a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for a generator, so the artists would be safe and warm during the frigid Ukrainian winter.
As I mentioned, I interviewed DK and Hugh about The Peasants talking to them from their home in Poland. Here’s an excerpt of the interview:
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There’s a new animated feature from writer/director wife and husband team Dorota Kobiela (DK) and Hugh Welchman known for the Oscar-nominated film Loving Vincent, called The Peasants. It’s based on a novel of the same name by Polish 1924 Nobel laureate Wladyslaw Reymont, a thousand-page tome so well-known in Poland that it’s taught in schools, and considered one of the classics of world literature.
The novel’s story is meant to deliver a complete and evocative look at the customs, behaviors, culture, and daily life of people in Lipce, a small Polish village, and unfolds over the four seasons. Although the original book follows multiple characters, including Boryna, the village’s richest farmer, his son Antak, Antak’s wife Hanka, and young, beautiful dreamer Jagna, The Peasants centers on Jagna. She is an optimistic artist, and quite a beauty, and all the men of the village want her, including Boryna. Against her wishes, Jagna’s mother makes a deal for a marriage to the old farmer. Jagna is guileless, and chooses her own lovers and interests, which include the married Antak. This causes judgment and hatred from the religious women of the village. This feature film shows the devolution of Jagna’s life resulting from her determination for independence and autonomy.
Created in the same style as Loving Vincent, The Peasants was filmed in a technique in which live action is shot, and then used as reference and interpreted through oil paintings, each created by hand at four studios in Poland, Serbia, Lithuania, and Ukraine. Those oil paintings then are shot and become the images seen as the finished film. Women made up 75 to 80% of the artists working on the film.
Not only did the pandemic prove a challenge for the production, but so too did the war in Ukraine. Female artists in the Kyiv studio in Ukraine (most men were not allowed to leave the country) were evacuated to the safety of the Polish studio. The Kyiv studio was reopened after the fighting in Kyiv eased, but bombing plunged the space into darkness, so the producers started a Kickstarter campaign to buy a generator.
The film, in keeping with the novel, is often very serious and sometimes emotionally oppressive, but every frame is nothing short of gorgeous, and really demonstrates the level of artistry animation can reach as an art form. It takes the work DK and Hugh Welchman did on Loving Vincent and expands upon it, showing the possibilities of their technique through this worthy interpretation of a classic novel.
Leslie Combemale of AWFJ spoke to filmmakers DK and Hugh Welchman about their latest project in this exclusive interview:
Leslie Combemale: Can you talk about how the visual language of The Peasants reflects the artistic style of the Young Poland period? I know Wladyslaw Reymont was part of the literature of the time. You use symbolism in the paintings, like, for example, the use of red with Jagna, and that’s part of the movement. Can you talk about that, what other aspects of the Young Poland period are represented, and in what way?
Dorota Kobieka (DK): Yes, we definitely reference aspects of that movement, using it as inspiration, more often than quoting the paintings, although we do have particular pieces that we quote. Mostly it is in elements like the composition and colors. There are a number we do use, like the painting Indian Summer, where Jagna is lying on the grass playing with the bit of fluff in the air, which is by Jozef Chelmonski, one of the main painters of that period. There’s another, with flying storks, when the farmhand and the boy are in the fields looking at the storks, that’s called Bociany, or Storks, also by Chelmonski.
Hugh Welchman: We have 42 direct quotes in the film, and actually 15 of them are Chelmonski, so he became our main guiding light, although we took inspiration from around 30 different Polish painters, and also more broadly across European realism. For example, we have a direct quote from the French painter Jean-Francois Millet. We wanted to draw on that whole movement. The Young Poland painters were particularly appropriate, because they were presenting this view of Polish culture trying to keep Polish identity and national spirit alive during the partitions, and the period that Poland had been wiped off the map by the three empires. They’re showing Polish life and Polish culture, and were presenting a positive image as well as trying to show how life was really like. That seems really appropriate for Reymont, because he presents his characters, warts and all, with their failings, but at the same time, he has a very affectionate view towards his characters. Even though they can be awful sometimes, you still love them, feel for them, and can understand them, even if they sometimes do some terrible things. Also, his descriptions are so beautiful, very often it’s magical realism rather than straight realism, because of his poetic descriptions, and his bucolic portrayal of nature and the peasant world. The Young Poland movement and the realist movement seemed to be the best ways to bring his prose alive.
LC: The transitions into each of the four seasons are a particular opportunity for stylization. DK you were part of the editing team, which was an important aspect of those transitions, but what were the discussions around that with production designer Elwira Pluta and director of animation Piotr Dominiak? Were each of the four sections of the film, in each seasons, separated stylistically?
DK: That was very big part of the development process, there’s a divisions of the story by the seasons, because that’s how it is in the book. It’s actually divided, originally, into four books, each book for a different season. We thought them really good for representing a certain mood and part of the film, so we tried to design around them. Mainly the colors represent the seasons, and we tried to find the mood of each season that is represented in the story.
HW: It was a big part of it actually, from when we wrote the script, because in the Reymond novel, the transition to a new season, he has these long descriptions at the beginning of each novel, so it was an opportunity for us to be visually quite flashy. We wrote these very long camera moves at the script stage. For example, when we went from autumn to winter, we always wanted to have a continuous pullback to represent the change of the season. Then with spring to summer, we wanted to have the 360 degree camera move. I think those transitions were always going to be set pieces for us, which reflected the fact that they’re set pieces in the book. One of the things that attracted us about making this into an oil painting animation is if you take three pages of his description of the winter storms coming in, we can do that in one twenty second shot.
LC: It also offered you the opportunity to advance from the style of Loving Vincent, and show many other ways in which you can utilize the techniques you use.
DK: It was absolutely more liberating to be able to do more camera movement and more challenging animation.
HW: We didn’t want to do Loving Vincent 2. A lot of people were asking what artist we would be doing next, and it was really important for us that we found something that would show that oil painting animation can be more than that, so that we can show the many possibilities of the technique. DK was very clear not to repeat the restrictions that we had with Loving Vincent. Part of the concept was was bringing portraits to life, so it was a talking heads concept. She wanted us to do something that was much more free, and have dynamic camera movement. The story of the ever-changing seasons and landscape, and the very volatile, dramatic story of the characters lended itself to this dynamic approach. In the novel, you have these amazing celebrations, and we saw that as a great opportunity, and you can see that in the dances, the battle scenes, and the wedding.
LC: The Peasants feels like a mixture, in terms of paintings, of portraiture, landscapes, and paintings of people in nature, like the one we discussed of Jean-Francois Millet. Was that intentional, and how did you determine the composition of the shots?
DK: Yes. exactly. In the book itself, Reymont uses different styles, which is very interesting. It’s very unusual for one novel to mix so many styles. He uses realism, Impressionism, and symbolism, depending on who is speaking, because sometimes he uses inner monologue of a character, and sometimes it’s the external narrator, who is very objective. Sometimes it’s the village itself telling the story. So it’s very interesting, and we thought it would be great to find the way to represent that in the painting styles.
HW: DK and Piotr put together an enormous file referencing nearly 400 paintings, and so while we only directly reference 45 paintings, there were over 300 elements of paintings that went into the film, like the clouds from a Ferdynand Ruszczyc painting, or the trees from another painting, so we not only had landscapes and these peasant portrait paintings, but we also had elements from lots of other paintings as well, like skies and sunsets.
DK: It was also something that we discussed a lot with our cinematographer, who was very sensitive to the painting style and he also didn’t want to shoot this like a movie. He was always thinking, “How would a painter sitting at an easel paint that?” We wanted to be true to that.
You can read the entire interview by going to AWFJ.org HERE.
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As a lovely gesture to me, knowing I own an art gallery, Hugh and DK offered my clients a discount on art when they buy it on The Peasants website. ArtInsights doesn’t make any money on this, and that’s 100% fine with us! The money goes to maintaining their studios, including the one in Ukraine, supporting their artists, and helping them in both promoting The Peasants and allowing them to move forward with their next project!
The discount code is artinsights_peasants_10. You can use it only once, and for a maximum of 2 paintings. (Paintings are between 250 and 2000 Euros) Be advised that shipping to the US is $300 via DHL. The paintings that feature Janga (the story’s protagonist) go very fast, but they seem to be adding paintings every few days. I do know it’s the studio manager doing the adding, and they’re pretty focused on getting US distribution for the film and promoting it wherever and whenever they can, so they’ll show up when they show up!
You can see all the art HERE.
I’m aware that many or most of you will want to see the movie before you buy any art! That’s fine! Hopefully it will be playing at a theater near you soon enough. In the meantime, let’s just celebrate the creativity, compassion, inventiveness, and badassery that it took and takes for these folks to keep moving animation forward as they are doing!