Loving Vincent: UK-Polish production launches the world’s first oil painted film

Billed as the world’s first oil-painted feature film, Dorota Kobiela’s and Hugh Welchman’s Loving Vincent is already a hot pick for this year’s Oscar nominations.

Originally conceived as a short, the loosely-styled biopic of Dutch impressionist Vincent Van Gogh blends stop motion and computer animation to capture the texture of the artist’s work on the big screen.

Some 125 artists worked on the UK-Polish production, using live-footage shots of the film’s high-profile cast — including Douglas Booth, Jerome Flynn and Saoirse Ronan — to create individual, oil-painted frames. Each artist was expected to make a third of a second of material every day: totalling 65,000 oil-painted frames by the end of production.

With each frame combined as part of a stop motion montage, viewers can truly lose themselves in Van Gogh’s work on the big screen.

Loving Vincent opens after Van Gogh’s death in 1890. It follows the story of Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth) — a young man tasked with carrying a letter written by the artist to his brother.

With a modest budget of $5.5 million, the film has already made $20 million in box office revenues worldwide. It’s also making a buzz on the film award circuit: scooping the prize for the best animated feature film at the European Cinema Awards and a Golden Globes nomination.

To find out more about the project, click here.