What is the film about?

Through art, Carlotta overcomes a rare brain condition that prevents her from recognizing faces.

What influenced it?

Carlotta vividly describes to us how a world without faces looks like. As a child, she got bullied by her teachers and classmates because she didn’t recognize them. She even doesn’t recognize herself in the mirror. Now in her 50s, Carlotta has developed a unique artistic form of haptic self-portraits over recent years. Using a lithographic approach, she finally recognizes herself in the hundreds of portraits she has been painting.

For CARLOTTA’S FACE, we were using animation to illustrate an unknown world where faces do not exist. The look of the animation is fully inspired by Carlotta’s art. The drawings in the film copy Carlotta’s rough chalk-like strokes and, similarly to lithography, most images in the film are negative, inverted images.

A little background information...

I (Valentin) work as a neuroscientist studying the human brain. While passing by a small, local art gallery in my hood in Munich, Germany, one of Carlotta’s self-portraits caught my attention. Only then, I learned that Carlotta suffers from prosopagnosia, or face blindness. Knowing about the miswiring of a specific, face processing brain region, I was fascinated that this deficit leads to such beautiful and captivating art. I then contacted Carlotta and for three years now, I have been following her life.

Valentin’s first encounter with his protagonist Carlotta was in a local art magazine. It showed one of Carlotta’s drawings noting that this was the self-portrait of a woman suffering from face blindness. At first, this picture looked like an accurate drawing of a face resembling the precise pencil drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. But looking closer, one realized that the proportions and individual aspects such as eyes and nose were completely off positioned and unrealistic.

This was the moment when Valentin knew that he wanted to do his next film about Carlotta.
Till then, he had written several drafts on stories around the science of brain and mind but was never really satisfied with his plots. No story so far would unite neuroscience and art as much as did Carlotta’s portraits. As a neuroscientist, he was driven by the question: How can this woman, and particularly her brain, produce such a captivating portrait of herself when she has never seen a face before?

How was the film made?

We looked over Carlotta’s self-portraits, which are all quite different from each other, and watched out for basic similarities that we could base our style concept on. Carlotta invented that style of “haptic self-portraits” to recognize herself. In almost complete darkness, she touches her face with one hand and draws her feelings with the other hand in a lithographic process. We watched out for abstract landscape structures, for patterns – we wanted to understand more about her method and at the same time we searched for a ground we could built our visual story on. After a certain time, we began collecting only the little details rather than looking at the whole portraits. So basically, we found our answer in the smallest pieces and ended up recycling details and painting from Carlotta’s work in order to put together completely new images instead of imitating her style. There is only one original full self-portrait in the film – in the last scene.

We used TVPaint and created two custom animated brushes out of the scans of herself portraits. Each brush contained around 80 single frames, that were animated randomly on different triggers like drawing speed, pressure, angle, etc. The grainy structure gace us a charcoal look for thinner lines and for the bigger shapes we used the other brush which was able to spray the scanned particles out like an aerosol can. I drew the basic shapes simply with the lasso tool and filled them. Before deciding for this workflow we experimented analog on different paper structures with charcoal and brushes, compared it – but finally decided for the digital brush workflow based on scans.