EX 9A: Matte Painting

Matte Painting

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A matte painting is painted landscape that can be used for a background. It is used to give the illusion of an environment that isn’t there.

DMP

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–Digital Matte Paintings are the same thing but created by compositing multiple images together in Photoshop. You are then able to export this as a TIFF or PNG to After Effects where you matchmove it to the footage.

Early Matte Paintings

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Matte painting has been around in film and TV for a long time and has gotten better over time. When it first started the matte backgrounds were hand painted and have progressed into being made digitally.

 Compositing Rules to consider when Matte Painting

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-Composition: You need to think about  the layout of the elements that you add to a DMP

-Lighting: The problem with bringing in multiple images is they may have been lit differently

-Matching Black Points is fundamental in pulling off a successful DMP/VFX Shot

-Lighting: The problem with bringing in multiple images is they may have been lit differently

-Colour Matching: This is another fundamental skill in compositing

-Perspective Matching: It is so important to match perspective in DMP’s – failure to do so will make your DMP look fake

Examples of matte painting in films:

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Star Wars

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This is a more traditional method of matte painting, technology wasn’t as advanced when Star Wars was in production. So matte paintings were hand painted. This would save a lot of money from being spent on any more special effects.

The Martian

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The martian is a more modern example. As cool as it would be, film crews can’t just fly up to Mars and record footage, not only would it be dangerous, it would be even more expensive. So, film crews will record the actor on a set designed to look like the surface of Mars. When they have a scene that is properly lit and colour corrected the matte background will blend in perfectly. Some are made with 3d models and some are drawn in 2D digitally.

With colour correction and a 3d matte background added you have this result.

Task: make a matte background with these source images. Thes will need to be colour corrected and composited together.

 

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Once I had got all the images separated I would then composite them into layers in photoshop to be colour corrected and finalised.

I scaled and positioned everything making sure the scale was correct compared to the pyramid.

I then went on to use correction layers to colour correct the mountains, trees, grass and the pyramid.

Final Product

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