"Creating
the Probable Impossibility."
NRN
DESIGN - VFX
The Illusion of Space.
What is a Matte Painting?-
Matte Paintings are remotely detailed works of art, designed to fool the
eye into an illusion of time and place
to which live action elements are composited into a scene.
Where did Matte Paintings Originate? -
Matte Paintings have been around for many, many, years. The most pronounced
use of a matte painting
is in Citizen Kane, in which the estate, Xanadu is shown under construction
in the distance, with miniatures representing construction crew
placed in the foreground, you can view this use of matte painting against
live action in Citizen Kane by clicking this link found here.
How is a Matte Painting Created?
- Matte Paintings are created by hand painting or presently can be digitally
created. In the Star Wars
Trilogy, matte paintings were created on large panes of glass
for compositing live action elements with still imagery.
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How are Matte Paintings used in the Trilogy?-
Matte Paintings are used to save money on constructing huge ships and locations,
in some instances
they are used to expand a set or miniature and even more impressive,
give the illusion of immense space. (Bespin for instance) and dizzying
heights.
Shown here, the actual stage for Obi's dizzying walk to
shut down the tractor beam in Star Wars, was actually less then
four feet off the stage
floor, but the addition of a matte painting, composited
with the live action footage now makes his quest three times as dangerous.
What
are Action Plates? - Action plates are the live action footage
that is projected through the blank areas of the glass matte (shown in
black or white), that is
later projected from one camera
to the next and later composited together with the latent image.
How does
the composite occur? What is the latent image? - The latent
image in the case of the images below, is the area of the film that is
left black, or
unexposed by the camera. This would
be in the case of this scene from Return of the Jedi, the droids
arriving at Jabba's palace on Tatooine. The droids
will be also be considered the live
action plate footage that will be composited against the painting of the
desert and Jabba's Palace in the background as well as the Rebel Hanger
Bay. By simply rolling your mouse over the image, you can see the black
areas fill in to the final picture, thus the composite is completed. Of
course it is not as simple as this demonstration, the process is covered
more extensively in the Optical Compositing
section.
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Unexposed to the camera. |
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one piece of film (fix in Dreamweaver) |
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Unexposed to the camera. |
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one piece of film (fix in Dreamweaver) |
Masking and Scraping - This
is a technique used to expose portions of a matte painting that is specifically
created on glass, which when scraped away
will allow the light of the projected image behind to protrude through
the glass and thus can create flashing lights, or flickering fires as shown
here, where
Chris Evans is scraping away portions of his painting to allow live
action footage to be placed in areas of the glass.
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for Return of the Jedi in which ewoks will be projected into the scene. |
composited against the matte painting of their villiage for Return of the Jedi. |
Compositing with Live Action Footage - Luke vs Vader (The Empire Strikes Back)
Since we now understand what matte paintings are, how they are used
for film, and the process of the latent image vs the background, it is
time to
see a full live action clip of all the elements come together in this
sequence from The Empire Strikes Back.
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The Final Composite used for the film can be viewed
here.
