Hugh Welchman Wiki: Everything To Know About The 'Little Postman' Filmmaker

Hugh Welchman was born in 1975. He is a British filmmaker, producer and screenwriter. Welchman studied at the Keble College, Oxford during the 1990s and earned his degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford University. In 2002, Welchman founded the film company, BreakThru Films. BreakThru Films is a film production company based in London, Warsaw and Dublin. The company concentrates mostly in the production of short and feature films, animation, documentary and live-stage shows. Welchman became the joint winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Short film in 2007 for the 2006 film, Peter and the Wolf. Suzie Templeton directed the film, Peter and the Wolf and he also got the Academy Award. BreakThru films produced the film, 'The Flying Machine' in 2011. 'The Flying Machine' was directed by Martin Clapp and Geoff Lindsey. Welchman co-directed the first of its kind, fully painted animated feature film, 'Loving Vincent' in 2017. He along with the woman who devised the idea directed the film together. Hugh Welchman was nominated for Best Animated Feature Film for Oscar 2018 for his film, Loving Vincent. Oscar 2018 will be held in March 4, 2018.

Hugh Welchman has a net worth of $14 million.

After years of blood, sweat, and tears — not to mention lots and lots of paint — the world’s first fully-oil painted feature film, Loving Vincent, was completed. It was a first of its kind venture and the entire credit goes to DorotaKobiela and Hugh Welchman, the directors of the film. BreakThru Films produced the film. Through 65,000 painted frames, the film recalls the challenging life of Vincent van Gogh, as well as his mysterious death. The film had a unique production plan and in a candid interview with the directors over skype, the interview could garner a lot of information about the idea, technology and the experience. The interviewer first wanted to know how the plan originated to which Welchman explained, "Dorota came up with the idea ten years ago when she was having a bit of a creative crisis in her life. She trained as a painter and then worked for many years in the film industry…so she decided she was going to combine those two things and do a painted film. In looking around for inspiration she re-read Van Gogh’s letters and it hit her very powerfully that Vincent was 29 when he started painting. She just thought it was an amazing powerful story and she wanted to bring his paintings alive to tell his story." Around 125 animator-painters worked on the film. The directors said that this was never the initial plan and they had to go through a lot of trouble sorting the funding. As the release date of the film was drawing near, they had no choice but to recruit more painters; which they successfully managed by sending out a recruitment video that got viral in no time. Around 5,000 painters and animators from around the world applied in order to be a part of the unique production. Welchman said, "There was no way we were ever going to find enough painting animators, And also the thing with painting animators is, very often they have personalized styles, and it’s not necessarily the case that they’re classically trained painters…We needed people who were very pure oil painters.” The film was made from original Van Gogh paintings. In all stages of pre-production, the directors stayed as close as possible to van Gogh’s view on the world. Kobiela explained, "His paintings represent such a big range of subjects; his room, his objects, his shoes, his best friends, his favorite bar. Together, they kind of naturally created the storyboard.” She further explained that "For each shot the original painting served as a sort of mask on top of the live-action material. Finding the right balance between those was quite the challenge. Van Gogh had a very interesting way of capturing things, It looks like he used a long and wide lens at the same time. Perhaps it was like that because he used to paint in one position, and then walk around and change [his position]. This way he’d capture the essence of the thing with a very bizarre perspective.” The directors had read everything there was to read about Van Gogh. In the recent 2016 book, 'Van Gogh's ear', they discovered that he had cut off his entire ear rather than a part of it and so they had to repaint 3000 frames of the film. The film had a budget of $5.5 million. This is less when compared to the laborious technique used in the film. Funding was made up from 40% pre-sales, 40% private equity, 15% government funding, and 5% from production house Break Thru itself. Out of 65,000 painted frames, just 1,000 survived because after finishing the painting of each frame, the animators had to remove the full painting with the help of a spatula and as a result, just a fraction of the hand-painted frames survived.