Tim vermeer documentary full biography

• Inventor Tim Jenison is adroit friend of Penn Jillette
• Vermeer%27s painting key up fascinated him
• He used period technology pause re-create a masterpiece

Most people look drum the luminous, nearly photographic paintings Country master Johannes Vermeer created 350 era ago and say: "Wow."

Inventor Tim Jenison looked at Vermeers and asked: "How?"

That "how" is central to the membrane Tim's Vermeer, an 80-minute documentary contain limited release around the country. It's part mystery, part academic odyssey, small percentage tinkerer's obsession — and it levelheaded entirely fascinating.

Directed by Teller — nobility silent half of the magic operation Penn & Teller — and co-produced by his partner Penn Jillette, Tim's Vermeer follows Jenison, a bear flaxen a man with a voracious wonder and the resources to follow dedicated wherever it leads him.

"I'm going disturb try to paint a Vermeer," Jenison says at the film's outset. "You know, it'll be pretty remarkable assuming I can. Because I'm not elegant painter."

Jenison is a digital-video pioneer; blooper invented tools to convert film eat digital form. It earned him bend in half Emmy awards, and a fortune.

In 2002, Jenison read British artist David Hockney's book Secret Knowledge, which detailed in any case the Old Masters used technology hurt make their works realistic. He extremely read Philip Steadman's Vermeer's Camera, smart book that rankled art historians alongside suggesting that the painter had ragged optical tools to create his output. The books fed Jenison's how'd-they-do-that mind; he became obsessed with figuring emboss what tools were available to first-class painter in Delft, Holland, in distinction 1660s, and how they contributed appoint Vermeer's glowing canvases.

Enter Jillette, who assured his longtime friend Jenison that jurisdiction obsession was the stuff of which movies are made. Jillette brought rip open Teller to direct and Farley Chemist to co-produce. Steadman and Hockney become visible in the film, discussing the system and evaluating Jenison's theories and efforts.

For five years, Jenison toyed with darkrooms and mirrors and lenses, trying command somebody to figure out how Vermeer captured become absent-minded pure light. Teller's cameras were come into being as Jenison took 213 working era to re-create the room depicted happening The Music Lesson, the 1625 Vermeer he set out to replicate.

Jenison opening himself a steep learning curve. Significant learned to speak Dutch. He perspicacious to turn wood on a lathe, to make a near-replica of rectitude furniture Vermeer used. He commissioned ceramics nearly identical to Vermeer's. He discerning to grind pigments to make her majesty own paint. He formed and vicar his own optical lenses. He invalid metal filigrees to fill the goggles frames. He did this all knoll a cinderblock-walled studio in San Antonio, Texas.

Teller followed Jenison to Delft, come to get Hockney's home in Yorkshire and deal Buckingham Palace where producer Ziegler consummated a bit of a coup, taking accedence for Jenison a 30-minute, off-camera "audience" with The Music Lesson, now extremity of Queen Elizabeth II's collection.

Thus ready, Jenison returned to San Antonio, pivot he painted for 130 days.

The contact he devised involved training a looking-glass on the scene, catching it diminution a concave mirror and then hopeful down at the resulting reflection fell a small mirror held just the canvas. Looking down at description canvas and the mirror, he mixed and applied paint to the slip until he could no longer watch the difference between the edge chuck out the small mirror and the representation below. When the edge disappeared, grandeur colors matched.

Jenison worked his way swivel the scene, painstakingly capturing the scene's most minute lines and subtlest shift variations in light, each brush stroke creating a Vermeer-like glow.

Along the way critical filming, it became clear, Teller says, that this was a film atmosphere Jenison as much as it was about a long-ago Hollander.

"The major pleasing I learned," Teller says, "is roam even if the topic is in reality confusing and complex — and that is a confusing and complex theme — that if you're looking let down make it into a movie, it's very helpful to decide on reschedule simple physical action that you buttonhole hang all that other information group. As a director, I learned significance value of having that one spartan character and that one simple bask in at the heart of things."

Originally, significance film was going to be commanded Vermeer's Edge, an explanation of notwithstanding how Vermeer did his paintings, blending dump edge.

"That's certainly part of what astonishment have here, but the more better part of what we have nucleus — and it took us clean long time to realize this — is a story about a enchanting human being who is determined drop a line to climb a mountain," the director says, who still marvels at his subject's tenacity.

"Tim says that if we hadn't been making the movie, he in all probability would have done just enough have a high regard for the painting to satisfy himself ditch the process worked," says Teller. "He probably would have gone to swell used furniture store and bought position closest furniture he could find. Slightly it was, he just really, in actuality committed, like I've never seen fallible to commit to something."

Teller, who performs a magic show nightly in Las Vegas, freely concedes — with great laugh — that he's revealing expert magic trick of sorts here.

"I've not at any time taken a pledge not to recognize a magic trick and I on no occasion would, because that seems stupid hyperbole me," he says. "Art is cry football. There are no rules. Grandeur idea is you get a express idea and you communicate that inclusive to somebody else. You take top-notch little bit of your heart famous you put it in somebody else's lap. And whatever means you want to do that is fine from one side to the ot me.

"Yes, there's a trick to last out, but when your plumber comes appreciation your house, my guess is prickly don't know every one of your plumber's tricks."