I often have to answer audience questions after screenings of my films
about how this kind of film is made, how much time it takes,
what techniques are used, what I should be feeling, and so on,
I'm forced to list the differences between painted cinema and puppet or traditional (cel-animated), or CGI films,
which are very popular nowadays,
In order to answer these questions, we've decided to make an instructive film describing how animation is drawn with paint.
Any animated (or live-action) film begins with the storyboarding.
A storyboard is like a sort of screenplay in pictures.
And a screenplay is like the diagram or plan of the future film.
This is really a very important element of the picture.
Though for me, it's not a rigid rule which can't be touched but only adhered to.
Storyboarding, for me, is what might be called a living organism, and...
practically throughout the whole film, there will be various changes, rearrangements of scenes, ideas...
Every time that I begin with a new idea, I start with the storyboarding
I spend a long time finding new angles, new points of view on this idea,
Sometimes I get some new ideas; other times I return to the original variant,
but you come back more sure of yourself; enriched by your doubts and efforts,
and only after following this path to the end, do I move on to the next stage.
The next stage is very important: it's the setting of the scene/shot.
In contrast to traditional animation, where the characters, scenery and backgrounds
are done by different artists, at different times, different places, and with different materials,
and only at a later time are all brought together to be filmed,
here these stages are all done simultaneously;
the scenery is set up, a character is drawn inside that same scenery,
and this is already the initial, starting frame.
The paints that my method uses are regular oil paints which can be bought at any store,
the only thing is that I pick out "transparent" paints; those are the paints which can transmit light through their layer.
They are also called "glaze" paints.
Why? Because body-colour paints, or parget, don't let light through; they only reflect it,
and this doesn't suit my method because I work with lamps that shine up from below, through the image.
that's why the paints must be transparent.
Usually there are few colours: 3, 4, maximum 6.
but thanks to the mixing of these colours,
and to the fact that you can have more or less dense layers, changing the density of the colour itself,
you can obtain basically any painting effects.
For creating the image, different instruments are used:
see, I have brushes here, various rubber pieces, sticks, cloths...
many different methods, but the most important one remains the hand.
The hand, the palm, and practically all of the fingers.
And this is the most important instrument for moulding the painting and the form.
All of these brushes and so on are just for cosmetics.
Creating the first frame takes several hours, sometimes the whole day.
It depends on the task, and on my readiness to stop.
my readiness to say "right, stop: it's done".
And then filming begins.
The filming and the painting happen practically simultaneously.
And in order to create the intended movement,
I must destroy the painted phase of the moving character or object,
and with a small movement, restore this image nearby.
In the place where the character was before, where there is now a hole,
you must restore the background and scene that was behind that character.
And all the animation rests on the fact that you're creating and destroying the same image
and constantly labouring on the scene, trying to restore its colour and texture.
This is the most annoying job in this whole painted process,
but there's no escaping from it, because without it we wouldn't get any movement.
But these difficulties are also, probably, advantages...
of this painted method, because...
thanks to this medium, to this painted texture,
this combination of the scene and character,
you get that beauty and unrepeatability which is impossible to reach with any other method.
It seems to me that neither celluloid nor, let's say, cutout animation...
(well, in extraordinary cases it can happen)
but it doesn't allow that organic sense that arises in painted animation.
The painted texture is good for creating fast, sudden movements,
for fast-moving panoramas,
this is much easier for me because I don't have to do any small details.
I don't have to paint eyes or buttons;
it's enough to create expressive strokes, creating with this method dynamic movement.
and this expressiveness, I think, beautifies the movement,
and I sometimes stop and admire the stopframes when I edit the film,
because the image that is created in this quick, almost stream-of-consciousness way,
possesses a unique strength inside, and this scenic expressiveness has a value of its own, even in a static frame.
...even in a static frame.
It's a different matter when you have to do, for example, portraits, or slow movements;
there you must be very meticulous; you must lengthily, monotonously reproduce all the details,
must try to hold the character, and his personality;
this takes up a lot of time and is fairly hard.
In order to keep my character recognizable,
I learned to apply the following method:
I invite some people I know, make lots of sketches, drawings, scenic etudes, snap photos and videos,
and this material later really helps me for keeping the character and his persona consistent.
In reality, a character is quickly forgotten if you don't have before your eyes drawings and photos of him in different positions
Very quickly: within a few frames, you can lose the character of your protagonist.
In order to avoid this, I make, beforehand, masses of drawings from different POVs of those people who I choose to be the prototypes of my characters.
This is what helps me to keep the character.
And this also helps... these living people (as a rule, I choose people whom I know well and love),
these people, with their personalities, help me to make the personalities of my painted characters believable.
This is the case for practically all of my films. At present, I'm working on the film "Mermaid".
This scene has taken up about 2-3 days of work,
though the scene itself lasts only a few seconds in the film.
Creating painted animation is partially an unconscious act,
though you plan out the scene and the character's actions
Sometimes, completely unforeseen things happen.
Sometimes, during the process of creating the stage, new solutions come,
the stage itself provokes the changing of the initial solution.
If this falls into the story's context, and makes things more interesting, I submit to such temptations.
This is the film "The Old Man and the Sea".
This is our prototype of old man Santiago;
my father Nikolay Sergeyevich.
Before the film, on my request, he played out several scenes,
And... my son, Dima, filmed him; they invented certain movements for our future animation.
This helped us out.
We didn't use these movements directly, but as an example of the plasticity,
this was very useful.
For the bar scene, where our young protagonist duels with a mighty black man,
we invited one creole; this was in Montreal.
we played out this duel with him,
and some angles, some frames really helped us.
The second major character of this film was the sea.
This was the first time in my life that I was forced to paint the sea,
And this was a difficult struggle for me, because I didn't know at all how it moved.
So to somehow win over it, we filmed some video, in order to understand the plasticity of the water's reflections, highlights and reflexes.
The boat caused us a lot of problems, and also the fish.
In order to understand its construction and architecture, we made a model and filmed it on video.
If that boat had not been filmed on video, I simply wouldn't have been able to draw it.
When I began to draw it (we made several tests),
my boat lost its form; it became malleable,
and its rocking did not look natural.
and in order to solve all these problems, we made this maquette,
rocked it back and forth before the video camera,
captured it onto film, and then, frame-by-frame, we used the movements of this boat.
and in order to...
and then we put these frames onto cels,
we cut them out, painted them, and placed them under the old man.
and we got the effect of the old man bobbing on the water with the boat.
If I did not have this maquette, with my impatient nature, I probably would've been defeated.
Thank God I had a good helper: my son Dmitriy. It's the first time I had a real assistant,
a person who understood the task 100%. I was fortunate that I had him to help.
You see, the problem is that a boat cannot stay still in place,
it's not on the ground or in a desert; the water rocks it up and down
so in order to portray the old man, we have to rock the entire boat along with him.
That was our misfortune.
Today, I've frankly had enough of doing films about water, about boats and so on.
because this is such a headache.
Also, this painted film is always done blindly.
You don't know what the result will be.
The good thing about this project is that we had a technical base;
we had computers, a video history, and thanks to this we could anticipate what we'd get...
...not long from now.
But... in reality, yes we had computers, but they had to be checked;
because sometimes they'd suddenly change their numbers, would lie, and show completely the wrong number of frames than what we expected.
So my cinematographer, throughout the whole process, recorded the position of every frame,
So he had his own computer; he did his own accounting.
and now these notebooks are lying there in Canada like museum rarities;
my producers are showing them to everyone they know, as a relic.
That's a kind of Russian talent.
And now to conclude, here's something for entertainment; a dessert.
or an advertisement: everyone, make animated painted films!