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I often have to answer audience questions
after screenings of my films

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about how this kind of film is made,
how much time it takes,

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what techniques are used, what
I should be feeling, and so on,

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I'm forced to list the differences between painted cinema
and puppet or traditional (cel-animated), or CGI films,

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which are very popular nowadays,

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In order to answer these questions,
we've decided to make an instructive film
describing how animation is drawn with paint.

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Any animated (or live-action) film
begins with the storyboarding.

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A storyboard is like a sort of screenplay in pictures.

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And a screenplay is like the
diagram or plan of the future film.

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This is really a very important
element of the picture.

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Though for me, it's not a rigid rule
which can't be touched but only adhered to.

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Storyboarding, for me, is what
might be called a living organism, and...

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practically throughout the
whole film, there will be various changes,
rearrangements of scenes, ideas...

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Every time that I begin with a new idea,
I start with the storyboarding

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I spend a long time finding new angles,
new points of view on this idea,

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Sometimes I get some new ideas;
other times I return to the original variant,

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but you come back more sure of yourself;
enriched by your doubts and efforts,

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and only after following this path to the end,
do I move on to the next stage.

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The next stage is very important:
it's the setting of the scene/shot.

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In contrast to traditional animation, where
the characters, scenery and backgrounds

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are done by different artists, at different times,
different places, and with different materials,

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and only at a later time are all
brought together to be filmed,

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here these stages are all done simultaneously;

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the scenery is set up, a character
is drawn inside that same scenery,

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and this is already the initial, starting frame.

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The paints that my method uses are regular
oil paints which can be bought at any store,

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the only thing is that I pick out "transparent" paints;
those are the paints which can transmit light through their layer.

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They are also called "glaze" paints.

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Why? Because body-colour paints, or parget,
don't let light through; they only reflect it,

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and this doesn't suit my method because I work
with lamps that shine up from below, through the image.

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that's why the paints must be transparent.

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Usually there are few colours:
3, 4, maximum 6.

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but thanks to the mixing of these colours,

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and to the fact that you can have more or less dense layers,
changing the density of the colour itself,

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you can obtain basically any painting effects.

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For creating the image, different instruments are used:

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see, I have brushes here, various
rubber pieces, sticks, cloths...

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many different methods, but the most
important one remains the hand.

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The hand, the palm, and practically all of the fingers.

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And this is the most important instrument for
moulding the painting and the form.

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All of these brushes and so on are just for cosmetics.

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Creating the first frame takes several
hours, sometimes the whole day.

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It depends on the task, and on my readiness to stop.

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my readiness to say "right, stop: it's done".

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And then filming begins.

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The filming and the painting happen
practically simultaneously.

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And in order to create the intended movement,

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I must destroy the painted phase
of the moving character or object,

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and with a small movement, restore this image nearby.

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In the place where the character
was before, where there is now a hole,

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you must restore the background and
scene that was behind that character.

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And all the animation rests on the fact that you're
creating and destroying the same image

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and constantly labouring on the scene,
trying to restore its colour and texture.

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This is the most annoying job in
this whole painted process,

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but there's no escaping from it, because
without it we wouldn't get any movement.

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But these difficulties are also,
probably, advantages...

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of this painted method, because...

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thanks to this medium, to this painted texture,

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this combination of the scene and character,

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you get that beauty and unrepeatability
which is impossible to reach with any other method.

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It seems to me that neither celluloid
nor, let's say, cutout animation...

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(well, in extraordinary cases it can happen)

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but it doesn't allow that organic sense that
arises in painted animation.

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The painted texture is good for creating
fast, sudden movements,

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for fast-moving panoramas,

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this is much easier for me because
I don't have to do any small details.

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I don't have to paint eyes or buttons;

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it's enough to create expressive strokes,
creating with this method dynamic movement.

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and this expressiveness, I think,
beautifies the movement,

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and I sometimes stop and admire
the stopframes when I edit the film,

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because the image that is created in
this quick, almost stream-of-consciousness way,

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possesses a unique strength inside,
and this scenic expressiveness has a value
of its own, even in a static frame.

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...even in a static frame.

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It's a different matter when you have to
do, for example, portraits, or slow movements;

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there you must be very meticulous; you must
lengthily, monotonously reproduce all the details,

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must try to hold the character, and his personality;

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this takes up a lot of time and is fairly hard.

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In order to keep my character recognizable,

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I learned to apply the following method:

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I invite some people I know, make lots of sketches,
drawings, scenic etudes, snap photos and videos,

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and this material later really helps me for
keeping the character and his persona consistent.

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In reality, a character is quickly forgotten
if you don't have before your eyes drawings
and photos of him in different positions

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Very quickly: within a few frames, you
can lose the character of your protagonist.

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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.

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This is what helps me to
keep the character.

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And this also helps... these living people
(as a rule, I choose people whom I know well and love),

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these people, with their personalities, help me to make
the personalities of my painted characters believable.

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This is the case for practically all of my films.
At present, I'm working on the film "Mermaid".

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This scene has taken up about
2-3 days of work,

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though the scene itself lasts
only a few seconds in the film.

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Creating painted animation is
partially an unconscious act,

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though you plan out the scene
and the character's actions

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Sometimes, completely unforeseen things happen.

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Sometimes, during the process of
creating the stage, new solutions come,

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the stage itself provokes the changing
of the initial solution.

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If this falls into the story's context, and makes
things more interesting, I submit to such temptations.

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This is the film "The Old Man and the Sea".

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This is our prototype of old man Santiago;

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my father Nikolay Sergeyevich.

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Before the film, on my request,
he played out several scenes,

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And... my son, Dima, filmed him; they invented
certain movements for our future animation.

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This helped us out.

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We didn't use these movements directly,
but as an example of the plasticity,

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this was very useful.

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For the bar scene, where our young
protagonist duels with a mighty black man,

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we invited one creole; this was in Montreal.

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we played out this duel with him,

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and some angles, some frames
really helped us.

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The second major character of this film was the sea.

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This was the first time in my life
that I was forced to paint the sea,

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And this was a difficult struggle for me,
because I didn't know at all how it moved.

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So to somehow win over it, we filmed some video,
in order to understand the plasticity of the water's
reflections, highlights and reflexes.

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The boat caused us a lot of problems,
and also the fish.

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In order to understand its construction and
architecture, we made a model and filmed it on video.

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If that boat had not been filmed on video,
I simply wouldn't have been able to draw it.

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When I began to draw it (we made several tests),

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my boat lost its form; it became malleable,

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and its rocking did not look natural.

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and in order to solve all these problems,
we made this maquette,

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rocked it back and forth before the video camera,

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captured it onto film, and then,
frame-by-frame,  we used the
movements of this boat.

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and in order to...

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and then we put these frames onto cels,

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we cut them out, painted them, and
placed them under the old man.

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and we got the effect of the old man
bobbing on the water with the boat.

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If I did not have this maquette,
with my impatient nature, I probably
would've been defeated.

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Thank God I had a good helper: my son
Dmitriy. It's the first time I had a real assistant,

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a person who understood the task 100%.
I was fortunate that I had him to help.

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You see, the problem is that a boat cannot
stay still in place,

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it's not on the ground or in a desert;
the water rocks it up and down

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so in order to portray the old man,
we have to rock the entire boat along with him.

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That was our misfortune.

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Today, I've frankly had enough of doing films
about water, about boats and so on.

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because this is such a headache.

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Also, this painted film is always done blindly.

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You don't know what the result will be.

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The good thing about this project is that
we had a technical base;

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we had computers, a video history, and thanks
to this we could anticipate what we'd get...

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...not long from now.

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But... in reality, yes we had computers,
but they had to be checked;

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because sometimes they'd suddenly change
their numbers, would lie, and show completely
the wrong number of frames than what we expected.

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So my cinematographer, throughout the whole
process, recorded the position of every frame,

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So he had his own computer;
he did his own accounting.

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and now these notebooks are lying there
in Canada like museum rarities;

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my producers are showing them to
everyone they know, as a relic.

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That's a kind of Russian talent.

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And now to conclude, here's something
for entertainment; a dessert.

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or an advertisement:
everyone, make animated painted films!