(subtitles by Niffiwan)
At the first stage of his work, the director created a screenplay
which consists of a series of pencil sketches of various scenes from the film.
These drawings serve as the outlines for images done in the "living painting" technique,
also called "paint-on-glass", which Aleksandr Petrov considers an ideal medium for auteur cinema.
So what are the distinguishing traits of this unique method?
The frames of the film "My Love", like the frames of the four previous animated films, are painted on glass.
Brushes are needed only for the final touch-ups.
Slow-drying oil paint that allows light to pass through is used.
The glass panels are located on two levels.
The first is for backgrounds, and the second is for characters.
Then each scene is filmed frame-by-frame,
formerly with a film camera, now with a digital still camera.
When the film or still images are projected at 24 frames per second,
the result is the continous motion which we, the viewers, see on the screen.
To be frank, computers really help.
They take off the stress which is always there when you work on film
because when you work on film, you don't know if the scene turned out right,
if the exposure was right, if the animation itself turned out as you wanted...
You see this only after a week or two;
when the film is developed and the positive printed, you watch it in a theatre and think "Ok, it came out as I planned"
or you watch it and think, "Disaster! Everything's bad!", go back and completely redo the entire work.
After beginning the work in 2003, as usual together with his cinematographer,
after a year the director realized that he was falling behind schedule.
For modern digital technology, the help of experienced programmers was needed,
while the scope of the work required the help of other painters.
Ater all, one second of screen time consists of 20 paintings.
it follows that for one minute, one must make 1200 paintings.
And for the full length of 26 minutes, about 35,000 paintings.
To help, we called for my colleagues, with which I had worked or studied before.
along with young artists who didn't know a thing about animation, but did want to try it out.
So they tried, got attracted to cinema, and so we got a group...
of artists, painters, computer-people and animators;
in other words, the kind of team with whose help the film finally got done.
Tatyana Pavlovich helped me with the text.
We discussed, sorted, and chose phrases; she basically was invited to work on the dialogues.
Mikhail Tumelya came after a year.
I asked him to be the second director.
He also worked on the screenplay a lot.
We put each scene "through its paces", as he liked to put it.
We would choose a block of material, setting aside 1-3 days
in order to play out this material, and make it internally interesting.
to make it dynamic, or the opposite; plastic, smooth...
and only after this would I move on to drawing the characters...
or rather, not the characters but the scenes, and delegating tasks to other artists.
Heaven's colour, colour blue,
Since my youth have I loved you.
In that youth, you seemed to me shade of changes that could be.