Sep 27, 2019

How they did it: inventing a new animation technique for The Physics Of Sorrow

Even for an animator who once made films in his own blood, "The Physics of Sadness" was a challenge.

Teodor Ushev makes it a habit to match style and theme, incorporating new techniques in each short film. The Bulgarian experimental filmmaker's latest film is a melancholic 30-minute meditation on the meaning of exile.

The film is based on encaustic painting, a millennia-old technique of mixing heated beeswax and pigments. In ancient Egypt, it was used to paint detailed portraits of the dead on coffins and tombs. More recent artists like Jasper Johns and Tony Sherman have used it, but Ushev is the first to apply it to animation. Below, he tells Cartoon Brew how he approached the task at the National Film Production Agency of Canada (where he has done much of his work since moving to Montreal in 1999).

The Physics of Sorrow is based on the novel of the same name by Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov, which also inspired Ushev's previous film, the Oscar-nominated Blind Beisha. Ushev uses the novel as a framework for exploring his own experiences with immigration, rootlessness, and the disillusionment of his generation's waning optimism. He considers the film a "time capsule," a snapshot of a bygone era, like an old Egyptian coffin.

In the film, the encaustic painting has a secondary meaning. The exact recipe was taught to Uchef by his father, an artist who plays an important role in the story. The father-son relationship is even reflected in the casting of the narrator, as Ushef explains below.

The following is an edited transcript of an interview conducted via email The Physics of Sorrow premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month and received an honorable mention from the jury for Best Canadian Short Film. Tonight it will screen in competition at the Ottawa International Animated Film Festival.

Theodore Ushev: (Gospodinov's novel) was about me. About my generation. About "minotaurs," children born and raised in small basements in small towns in Eastern Europe during the communist era. I saw the possibility of making a film as a kind of time capsule. And Gospodinov, like me, writes pictures.

I think that cinema, especially animation, is very different from the way literature and writers think. I sent Gospodinov a draft of the script. Some of his comments were valid. While writing the script I wanted to personalize the story. I couldn't have done it otherwise. His style is very poetic, but there's not a lot of action, so I had to rethink a new structure. All the action basically came from my life and the lives of my friends.

Ushev: The script was originally in French, so first I recorded my voice in French. [Famous filmmaker] Xavier Dolan did a great job. Then we started looking for English actors (this is a Canadian film, so we had to work with Canadian actors).

Natalie, producer Mark Bertrand's wife and voice director, had worked with Rossif Sutherland on one film, and she said, "He has a great voice." I listened to that and thought, yes, that's exactly how I envisioned his voice for my film. Later, he was kind enough to bring his father Donald to the project as a special guest voice.

For me, it was important to give the actors the tone, mood, and character I was looking for. Voice acting in animation is very different from live action. If there is overacting or overreacting, or if it is not realistic, the image is ruined. Synthesized images do not have the emotion of a real human voice. Animation often clashes with voice. Care was taken not to be overly emotional or melodramatic.

Ushef The first time capsule was an Egyptian tomb. And on the lid of the sarcophagus was a beautifully realistic portrait painted in encaustic painting. It was made of melted beeswax and colored pigments and had remained completely intact for 20 centuries. So I thought this would be the perfect technique to employ in my film. But not only did I have to learn to paint images and portraits using this technique, I also had to invent a way to make it work.

I had a vague idea that I wanted to make films like Gerhard Richter's photorealism. I drew inspiration from [Ingmar] Bergman and the directors of the Czech Nouvelle Vague. But basically, I found my style using encaustic techniques, so I did it my way.

Ushev: I had to invent everything: paint recipes, brushes, hot plate temperatures, mediums, sets, how to make decorations that would not break when hundreds of frames animated on them. It was pure chemistry. I could have called the film The Chemistry of Sorrow."

The encaustic technique uses pigments mixed with hot beeswax. There are industrial paints available, but that technique did not work. So my father gave me his original recipe. Magic happened. I imagined that with a hot gun I could change every image, reapply the next image, and melt it again. I devised a very simple setup. It needed a human touch, a DIY feel, a personal look.

Initially I used a "green screen" like effect. I drew moving figures on green paper and added a background in After Effects. Then I found an easier and more natural solution. I painted the background with gouache and crayon, covered it with a more heat-resistant palm wax, changed the top with beeswax mixed with paraffin, and topped the figure with liquid wax and pigments that did not require much heat. In this way, only the moving figures could be altered without having to repeatedly shoot the camera in complex settings. Stop Motion Painting