Vladimir Vinkić was born in Pančevo in 1978. He graduated from painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade and finished the specialist studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. He has exhibited in many solo and group shows, and in recent years he has been particularly recognized for his work on the film Loving Vincent: the first fully hand-painted feature film in the history of cinema.
With Vladimir we talk about another cinematic project, which will be produced in the same way. It will be a minority Serbian co-production for the feature animated film The Peasants, done in the oil painting technique. In collaboration with the Belgrade studio Digitalkrafts, 15 Serbian painters will conjure up the motifs of the villages of Vojvodina and local folk costumes. The film is an adaptation of the novel by the Polish Nobel winner Władysław Stanisław Reymont, directed by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman.
Last October, it was announced that you would be working on the fully hand-painted animated feature film Seljaci (The Peasants). At what stage is the project at the moment and what is your role in it exactly, since you are listed as a supervisor of the team of painters?
V: The film is currently in a pre-production phase and in the coming months we are expecting to get the material we need to begin with the production. In short, the film was shot in Poland with actors in front of a Chroma key screen, while the background and scenography were made in Belgrade, in 3-D technology. That’s a new way of making movies. This part of work was done by DigitalKraft studio, our close and great collaborator from Belgrade. Currently, we are working together on the painters’ recruitment. So far we have tested around 80 painters in the animation studio built in Belgrade. I am glad there were so many applicants and all of them were really good. The testing should be completed in a week or two and it will be hard to shortlist only the best 20 or so of them for the next stage, which is a training course where they will be working on a new animation for another 2-3 weeks and learn how to create an animated film.
After that, 10 candidates will be selected to work with us on the movie painting. This is where I will be working as a supervisor, together with my colleague Biserka Petrovic. Our task is to explain and introduce each one of the painters to the animation process. Each candidate will have 3 days for painting and animation. It’s a hard and demanding work, but if you are good at it and understand the process, everything gets quite interesting and easy. Generally, what they do is paint one frame (a painting) and then add the moves based on the projection and gradually introduce the completed painting to the next frame. This is then photographed and that’s how animation is done. I am truly looking forward to the start of the production by the end of next month as I will also start working on the painting process.
Painting and animating the film “Loving Vincent” took 4 years, and the movie was critically very well received. What did you learn from this experience and how hard (or easy) was it for you to paint hundreds and hundreds of similar frames for a long period of time?
V: I was working on this film for 6 months, and during that time I made around 500 paintings. I learned a lot from it. I doubt that I would ever, as a painter, get in a situation to paint 3 paintings a day. It is a lot, but the process is easy. My painting process is now much quicker and I feel a lot more confident in it now. The best part, however, was collaboration with other painters, because we all became one family. This way of working actually helps painters to overcome vanity and it brings them together. It is not a competition and we all share all of our experiences and knowledge.
Besides these projects, what else have been you working on lately and do you have time for authorial work at all?
V: My engagement in the last movie opened up new job opportunities. Recently I have finished a project with the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade where I did animations and visual design for the exhibition “Serbian Double-Knit Socks”. The exhibition will be on view for one year, so I recommend you come and see it. I find it fascinating how this is similar to what I will be doing on this new movie “Seljaci”: the time period and Serbian folk costumes are the same. I learned a lot about our folk costumes, which are very similar to Polish, and this will certainly help me in my future work.
Apart from painting, I also illustrate and do 2-D animation. I have always been attracted to technology and would often use computer to make sketches for my paintings. I still do it today, only the tools are different. Yet, nothing can replace oil, brush and painting knife.