I know I'm late to the conversation, but i thought I'd leave my question here in case you happen to check in.
I've been a digital matte painter for features for a while now (I was on Hugo too), and I work or have worked along side quite a few original painters whome I'm positive you know. Over the years I've noticed a general reluctance to use matte painting in favor of using all 3d for massive environments. The other studio trend I see is the "lets create the composition in 3d, and hand that cg base to the matte artist to digitally paint on top of". In my humble opinion, this has created a situation where a lot of the beautiful compositional artistic decisions that the matte artist used to make has been taken away, and the end result seems to be less impressive almost generic big hero shots.
My question is, what are your feelings on the overall look and design of films these days? Do you feel like anything has been lost artistically and if so, what do you think we need to bring back some of the magic like in those Star Wars mattes. I would love to hear your general thoughts on this.
zandernice41 karma
Hi Chris,
I know I'm late to the conversation, but i thought I'd leave my question here in case you happen to check in.
I've been a digital matte painter for features for a while now (I was on Hugo too), and I work or have worked along side quite a few original painters whome I'm positive you know. Over the years I've noticed a general reluctance to use matte painting in favor of using all 3d for massive environments. The other studio trend I see is the "lets create the composition in 3d, and hand that cg base to the matte artist to digitally paint on top of". In my humble opinion, this has created a situation where a lot of the beautiful compositional artistic decisions that the matte artist used to make has been taken away, and the end result seems to be less impressive almost generic big hero shots.
My question is, what are your feelings on the overall look and design of films these days? Do you feel like anything has been lost artistically and if so, what do you think we need to bring back some of the magic like in those Star Wars mattes. I would love to hear your general thoughts on this.
Thanks for doing this AMA!
View HistoryShare Link