Plate Combination

Plate combination and Set extension plates in motion.


Making matte painting reel WIP from Petri Jarvinen on Vimeo.

Plate combination sketch

The idea of this sketch is to combine plates. In this case I combined two very different plates, mountains and desert.

Turning day to night sketch

This shot is a locked off camera. The original footage is time lapse and since changing this to a night shot require very intensive paint over, I'm not sure what to do with those moving cars. I'm trying to avoid painting them back in frame by frame. Since the final matte painting doesn't have to be a time lapse, one option would be to paint a layer of cars with lights on and animate them manually, then I could paint a depth map of the street and surroundings and animate 2.5D lights that are moving with those cars. That way I could get those cars to emit light to surrounding trees and buildings too and make them a little bit more believable.

I'll have to think about that and ask for opinions..

Version 2

Starting to make my matte painting reel

I'm now studying Compositing at Escape studios. Since my tutor has worked in the industry for many years as a compositor I asked if she knows what kind of skills companies want to see in a matte painting reel. She came back to me with the following e-mail from her colleige:

There are typical things I look for in a candidate:
-Photorealism
I'm more keen on seeing well integrated elements than a bunch of fantastic stuff thrown together without any integration
-Snowing up scenes (adding snow to forest, cities)
-Day for night scenes (adding lights to a city, buildings etc)
-Set extension (ie. extending a skyscraper)
-Sky replacements
-plate combination (empty desert + mountains)
-plate relighting (painting lights on a plate of a mountain with an overcast sky or inversely, removing light from a plate)

Those would be all good excercises to determine his skills. Concepts and drawings are nice but he must be mindful that if he's applying in one particular field, he needs to focus his demo on that. Please tell him to make sure his demo reel plays on a dvd player before sending it.

So I now have a list of what I have to do and I know the final size ( DVD ). I'm planning to paint these in HD resolution so I can resize them to DVD in the end to make it a little bit sharper. I've also decided that the aspect ratio will be widescreen (16:9).

The footage I have for these is in HD (1920x1080 pixels) so I'm going to work in that size and resize them to proper size when they are all done.

So I started with Set Extension, and this has some plate combination in it too.

I'm using three different plates for this and the camera movement will be a simple nodal pan.

Matte sketch

Christmas is over and weekend starts.. Time to continue with this self-directed matte painting course with a simple painting.
This is a sketch of a matte painting and I made it just as a planar image with no intension of 3d projection - better to start with simple things and then move to more advanced topics.
I'm actually working with my laptop so things are a bit slow, but at least it forced me to start with a small sketch. So when I start to make the actual matte, I will create a new image and use this as a reference.

Comments and most of all critique is welcome at this point, now that I'm still working with sketch and big changes are still easy to make.

Cheers, Petri.J

Contrast

The idea of creating contrast is to attract the eye.

Now some of you might think that contrast is only a difference between white and black, but that's not all that I mean with contrast. Contrast is the difference between things. So contrast is light and dark, round and sharp, new and old, natural and technical, complex and simple.. You get the point.
You can also think that contrast is separating one thing from another, and you can take that thinking to very abstract level. For example paint something that hasn't been seen before and that way creating a contrast between existing paintings and your new painting.

" To have contrast, you need to have similarity. "

If you have a white paper that has one black spot in the middle, that black spot attracts the eye. Now if you fill the paper with black spots, then the eye doesn't attract to that place anymore.

Ways to attract attention

Just to name a few..

(Images are from national geography's photography contest)

Sharpness

Color

Size

Density

Things that don't belong

A familiar form

The danger of over doing
This is very common problem when creating contrast.
When you have too many of those red leaves that work as a contrasting element, the eye doesn't know anymore where to look.

Conceptions

Conceptions is all about telling a story.

You give the viewer a piece of your self, this is where experience shows. If you have been through a lot in your life, you will tell interesting stories more easily.
This is a subject where you really have to open your eyes and look around. What can you see?

• Do you see a dirty car passing and somebody has written "I love you" in the window.
• Do you see a busy street in rush hour, there a tired business man standing and looking in to emptiness with tie thrown over his shoulder.
• Do you see a bus where all passengers are looking in one direction except one.

What can you see?

The story can be very simple

Or it can be very complicated
Creating conceptions is the part where you really have to look in the mirror and capture what touches you the most.

A story in an image requires one very important element - The viewer. You as an artist only give a set of conceptions, but the viewer is the one that actually completes the story.

Children
Children are usually a very good way of telling a story since they can tell so many things to different people.

Who is the story for?
Try to find a subject that your audience understands and can relate to and what makes them think.