The Lodge

This is my first new matte painting for my '09 demo reel.

In 2006 I took some photos in Washington DC of some of the various famous sites around the national mall. One of my favorite buildings was The Smithsonian Arts and Industries building.

I always had something "Harry Potteresque" in mind for the building but after sketching out quite a few ideas, I decided to just let some of my personal interests and style come out.

I've always been interested in Secret Societies, ornate and gigantic structures in remote locations, and the very end of magic hour right before it gets dark. I decided to create and environment that would be a meeting place for the barons and baronesses of industry, power, and money.

I sketched out a few things such as the lights, the bridge, the steps leading up to the building, and then when I felt I had a good enough idea of what I wanted I started painting and laying in photos. Honestly I can say that this has been one of the hardest paintings I have worked on but it's been very rewarding. I recieved alot of great feedback/critques from DJ Smack Mackey and Hugh Macdonald and I really feel that without them this matte painting wouldn't be as good as it is.

Here are the photos I used to put this together, all (except the dated one...that was from a friend that went with us to Hawaii) are my own taken in San Antonio, Arizona, Washington DC, and Hawaii.

brush demo/tutorial

Over the past three years I've created, collected, and edited brushes to use in my concept art and matte paintings.

I've decided to release these brushes to the wilds of the internet. Feel free to use, edit, and share them. Do whatever you want with them. Tweak them and then call them your own. Be inspired and have fun.

http://mordecaidesign.com/mattejourney/mordecai_brushdemo.zip

The concept painting I created with them:

Here's a 40 min video of me painting with the brushes

Matte World Digital's Benjamin Button work

Via: VFXBlog

Matte World Digital's website has before and after pics of the studio's work for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

For which Craig Barron won an OSCAR!

Matte Painting is Back! (in the VES's eyes anyway)

Really, matte painting has never taken a hiatus. The growing number of matte painting jobs in VFX houses is a true testament to this fact. 

However, in recent years matte painting has lost favor because it's become popular to lump matte paintings in with "environment design".  Environment design is a blanket term to mean procedural terrain, 3d environments, HDR panoramic photography, and many other cool techniques. 

Even the VES (Visual Effects Society),  has grouped matte painting in with "Created Environments" for the past 4 years .  At the 4th annual VES awards Star Wars Episode III was nominated for this award yet 3 out of four of the recieving members were matte painters:

Jonathan Harb

Yanick Dusseault

Brett Northcutt

And the next year the same thing happened with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, with 2 out of 4 of the artists working as matte painters:

Chris Stoski

Susumu Yukuhiro

(my apologies if I missed anyone's names)

This year the VES has decided to do the RAD thing and bring back the awards for Outstanding Matte Paintings in a Feature Motion Picture and Outstanding Matte Paintings in a Broadcast Program or Commercial. Here's the full list (with links to the matte painters portfolios!  :D  Sorry compositors. This is about us for now) :

Outstanding Matte Paintings in a Feature Motion Picture

CHANGELING - 1928 Downtown L.A.

Romain Bayle, Abel Milanes, Allan Lee, Debora Dunphy

INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL

Richard Bluff, Barry Williams, Yanick Dusseault, Yusei Uesugi

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK - Matte Paintings

Brett Miller, Garrett Eaton, Matthew Conner

SPEED RACER - Overall Matte Painting Presentation

Lubo Hristov, Dennis Martin, Ron Crabb

Outstanding Matte Paintings in a Broadcast Program or Commercial

DOCTOR WHO - SERIES 4 - Silence in the Library

Simon Wicker, Charlie Bennett, Tim Barter, Arianna Lago

GENERATION KILL - Episode 2

Christian Irles, Yannick Bourgie

MERLIN THE MARK OF NIMUEH SERIES 1 - The Mark of Nimueh

Dave Early, Simon Wickers, Bryan Bartlett, Sara Bennet

Awesome job everyone! 

Thank you VES for bringing back the matte painting award!

Progress check!

Here are the updates from my "demo reel" work

accentuate the negative

Zoic is famous for faking it and adding to the realism of shots.  The camera movements in Cloverfield were built off of it. You see it more and more in matte paintings. 

Sloppy camera movement. Despite sounding bad it can make a shot look more "real".  

My good buddy Cliff Berry  suggested that I ditch the stabilize nodes and go for a more "handheld" look. 

So I did. 

CGTalk2

Again, this is just a garbage composite, but I wanted to re-comp this and see how it looks. It desperately needs some motion blur to match the original footage's blur, but I'll work on that later. It's back to work on my "coastal city" and "road to hell" matte paintings

Shake comps

Here are my first comps in shake. Mind you, these are both garbage comps, just meant to give me an idea of what I need to work on. 

Lost World

CG Talk Challenge

Panoramic matte candidate

Richard Cave (aka: RockHopper) is a fellow matte painter, but he's also an amazing photographer, embeded photojournalist, and a nice guy to boot. 

Richard has been experimenting with handheld panoramic photography. He's received much better results than I have (as to be expected) but I promised to post the results of an image that I shot back in June of 07 in St. George, Utah. 

I've just decided that this might be a good candidate for a matte and will have to test it with the groundplane painted in. 

The original image is 6841 x 2730 and 180 ppi. 194 MB

The Lost World

I need to rework this for my reel as well. This was a  matte created for 3dm3.com 's Lost World Contest. This was my second finished matte painting.

Atlantis

I am re-working this matte now for my 08 reel but this was my first finished matte painting. 4k.