Matte painting is often a painted glass pane that is used to show a landscape or large set piece. It was heavily used to create certain scenes in film-making, such as Indiana Jones or Star Wars. Matte painting is one of the most crucial and original VFX techniques in film industries. To recreate a scene from painting to live footage set in film would have cost significantly more if they haven't used this technique.
[Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom]
[Matte painting - mixture of matte painting and live set]
One of the main reason why I was intrigued with matte painting is that matte painting is very similar, or it can even be equaled as a realistic painting. Few differences would be that matte painting is a creation of an environment scenes which is either fictional or enhanced version of photograph, whereas photo-realism/hyperrealism is a painting which is exactly identical to the view or photograph. Stepping aside from differences, interesting fact of matte painting is that it is not just about creating a certain environment scenes, its to enhance the view of environment with painters techniques and ideas. One of the ideal example would be a scene from Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back.
[Matte Painting and live set of Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back]
[Matte Painting - Progress of Indiana Jones & Star Wars]
This is just one of the example from Star Wars but to be able to create a scene from a painting and able to utilise it in live set was essential, especially for sci-fi films (material cost to create all these sets back in the day would have costed a lot more than a detailed matte painting).
As a personal opinion, matte painting isn't all about to create a scene which would not exist in real life, but to able to tell certain expressions within the image and able to inspire the audiences.
No comments:
Post a Comment