Painting Frame By Frame
If you think animating using keyframes is tedious, imagine creating an oil painting for every single frame. Loving Vincent is an animated feature about Vincent Van Gogh, created entirely using oil painting. Around 65,000 paintings were created by 125 artists to make the film. The film is currently in limited release in the US.
The work that was done for Loving Vincent is stunning, but it’s not the first time this kind of technique has been attempted. In 1999, the Academy Award winner for Best Animated Short Film was an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, directed by Aleksandr Petrov and animated by Petrov and his son, who hand-painted roughly 29,000 frames using pastels on glass.