VFX

January 2020

matte painting

what is matte painting?

Matte painting is the practice of painting on a glass pane which is placed in front of a camera to add more atmosphere and pull off something the original developers of the film or project could not pull off due to the cost or sheer impossibility or complexity of the scene. Nowadays most matte painting is used digitally.

example of matte painting used in Star Wars: Return of The Jedi

example of matte painting used in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

Matte painting demo task:

Plan:

I was tasked with creating a matte painting for the first time using pre-existing footage. The footage included our tutor (Keith) running away from two people, slugging along like zombies.

here’s the raw footage I was given to edit:

That’s when the idea popped into my head:

As a young teen I spent countless hours immersed in the Call of Duty videogame series, and most of that time was playing the Zombies mode available with titles such as Black Ops II (2012). The first Zombies map available is a hellish, apocalyptic earth after the earth was nearly decimated by a missile launch from the moon. The skies are dark, red, hellish, lava pools cover the ground.

The plan was to implement memorable features from the map, like the bus and the lava pools etc. into the scene.

Screenshot taken from Call of Duty: Black Ops II(2012)’s Zombies gamemode. the bus in the background was something I wanted to at least reference in some way, shape or form. The sky would be hard to pull of so I instead planned to make it a hellish red.

The mystery box is a randomised weapon generator to help spice the Zombies experience up a little. Where the box is on the map is visible via a bright light in the sky, which I wanted to also add in the background somewhere in the matte composition.

In Photoshop I tried many times to make sure the matte painting was not disrupting the original shot, and with what I was wanting to do that made this process rather difficult. I first began mapping out the path Keith took running to the door, then away as the two people chased him. After I mapped this out using a polygonal lasso tool, I deleted the mapped out part so it wouldn’t disrupt the footage.

After this I began putting a hole in the floor next to Keith for a large pool of steamin’ hot lava, scorching some surrounding objects and swallowing one of the ‘weird cube stone sitty things’ as I call them.

I then had the hilarious idea of slamming the bus from Zombies into the side of a building, a rather bizarre place for a bus to be. I then edited the bus model and added some lights and darkened the overall model to make it more believable that it was in the scene.

The final step included punching a rather large hole in the side of the building and masking a new, more hellish and orange, sky into the background to replace and ironically contrast the original, blue sky.

screenshot from photoshop

After this, it was complete.

I then hopped into Premier Pro and made some final adjustments to both the footage and the matte overlay.

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premier pro screencap

I cut the last few seconds of the video, then added my composition over the top. The matte painting was darker than the footage and so I did some colour correcting on both ends to make it look as close to each other as possible.

Now, this was a first try and because of that obviously there are some glaring issues with the final outcome.

The colours of both the matte painting and the footage even through the filter I have added are different and correcting this would be difficult to say the least. Another issue is that everyone’s heads get cut off towards the end of the video. Nothing that can’t be fixed in the future.

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