1. Matte Painting Composition

A matte painting composition is where a scene is built up of a collection of different layers to form one realistic looking setting.

Dylan Cole is a popular visual effects artist who has worked on many films, including James Cameron's "Avatar", £Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift", "Superman Returns" just to name a few. If you click on the link below; You can see some of Cole's work.

Dylan Cole's Demo Reel

Matte painting can be a very lengthy process, but can be done in either of two ways:

1. Filming against a coloured screen (Green/Blue). This allows the digital artist to separate the subject from the background easily (if lit properly) and lets them have more freedom over their surrounding environment.

OR

2. Filming on location and rotoscoping. This may not always be the case depending on where the footage is shot, or how many effects are to be added, however, when on location; there is a high chance there may be some unwanted people/animals or any everyday object in shot that will have to be rotoscoped out in post production. Rotoscoping is more often than not a frame-by-frame job, which at the UK standard of 25 frames per second; can be a very time consuming process.

TASK

Each member of the group could either work solo, or in a group of maximum 4 people, and had to film 20 seconds of footage of a person or people walking through shot on location, and create a matte painting composition. I chose to join a group of 4 (Myself, Dafydd Jones, David Terhorst, Matt Rowlands). Our reasoning for not doing the video by ourselves was so we could develop a more detailed composition by assigning each person a different job role.

My job was to create the matte painting, which I was really looking forward to making because I had never done anything like it before. However, to create a matte painting, you need to know what you're making it for.

RESEARCH

We discussed what kind of genre we wanted our composition to follow and finally agreed on a post-apocalyptic city. Next we did research on what kind of things may appear in this sort of area if ever it were to occur.

I had recently played a PS3 game called "The Last of Us" which is a survival game based in a post-apocalyptic city set 30 years in the future, only rather than technology advancing, it has deteriorated, along with the city itself. The pandemic in the game was caused by an outbreak of an infection, causing people to turn into zombie-like mutants. Here are some examples of how Naughty Dog, inc. imagine a post-apocalyptic city to be:

A once popular shopping area, now destroyed and riddled with
greenery

A main road covered with overgrown plants and rusty old

cars

A collapsed skyscraper with rubble and dust surrounding

it

A main road now flooded to car level and more overgrown
greenery

Playing the game and conducting this research helped a lot toward the making of our composition, however, we thought that the reason why there were so many overgrown plants scattered everywhere was because they had 30 years to grow.

To try and make the overgrown greenery look more plausible, we tried to film in an area with lots of trees, leaves and tall grass. These are some stills of some of the areas we chose:

Original plans for this area were to create a crater on the grass and add rusty cars around it with sky scrapers in the distance. When I tried this, the crater didn't seem big enough to look real. Eventually we dropped this location as we felt it didn't have enough depth in order to look realistic.

With this lake, we wanted to add rusty cars half-sunk in it and add road signs to seem similar to the flooded picture from the collection of "The Last of Us" photos. This proved to be very difficult to do as the wind was blowing the water, which would mean the water would react with the cars as it flows past them. None of the group were able to create this effect at this time as it would involve the use of particles. (Also the seagulls were a nightmare to rotoscope).

This spot wasn't planned originally. As we were walking back to the car we noticed it looked as though it could easily be made to look post-apocalyptic (because of the fallen leaves, the path, the bushy trees. However, once we looked back at the footage, we noticed it felt quite a lot like the first location in the sense that it didn't have a lot of depth to it.

So after a failed attempt of finding a suitable location this time around; it was back to the drawing board. We couldn't think of any way we could make it look anywhere near the standard of "The Last of Us", so the group came to the decision to set it closer to the present time, meaning that plants wouldn't be overgrown yet, but the place would look an awful lot worse than they do now, e.g. riot damage, vandals, abandoned. For this, we decided to do the opposite of the first plan and head to a location with buildings.

This was the final location we looked at and eventually agreed on pursuing. I used this screenshot to start the matte. 

I used photoshop to make the matte, I added things like a rusty zombie outbreak van, graffiti and and skyscrapers, but unbeknownst to me; you can add .PSD files directly to after effects and adjust the layers in there, but I had merged all of the layers together and blurred them and overwrote the original .PSD file, making it unable to tweak. This is how it looked:

This is what my Matte looked like, I was very proud of this as I thought it looked very good considering it was my first time doing something like this.

When it came to making the characters walk through shot, the group had to rotoscope around them walking past the broken wall and the van, but given this was our first time doing rotoscoping, it didn't quite go to plan. We used to many mask layer points around each person, making it incredible difficult to do. Here is an example:

As you can see; there are around about 200 points per character, which when having to adjust every single point in 500 frames, became more time consuming and began to hinder our project. It also created a shimmering effect around each person, which took away from the sense of realism. However, before we realized that this method was a difficult way, we had already done most of the frames, so we pursued it.

Due to complications of other work and meeting their deadlines, it became too much for the group to handle, so we agreed on redoing the video.

It was a very last minute decision, so we had to get to work fast. I began remaking the matte painting.

This is the new painting:

This time after having remade the matte, I knew to leave the layers
separate and was able to improve (I feel).

I was mostly proud of how this building looked after I edited it

This is what the final video looked like:

A video breakdown demonstrates the process at the end of this clip.

I enjoyed helping make this video, although it became very stressful toward the end. Looking back; there are many things I would have changed, although, if these setbacks hadn't have occurred; I feel I would not have learned anything. I would definitely like to improve my matte painting skills and possibly pursue it at some point during my career.