I was a little disappointed that most of the books I found on Digital Matte Painting were more how to guides and didn't offer any insightful reading as to the history or why it's important etc, but I shall cover these when I come round to testing the water with digital matte painting as a technique.
'Creating digital matte paintings today is an amazing process enabling us to produce completely realistic environments.' Craig Barron. (Rickett R, 2007)
Now with the advent of digital technology, we have the tools to create even more astonishing imagery. Matte painting has become the basis of the “virtual set” approach that I have had the delight to explore, and which is becoming and more the filmmaking approach to the future. (Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C. 2004)
Like every aspect of special effects production, matte painting has been dramatically revolutionized by the arrival of the computer. 'Probably one of the earliest examples of the computer encroaching on to the territory of the matte painter was during production of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The film features a sequence in which a barren moon evolves into a lush planet after being treated with the so-called 'Genesis device'. Once the device hits the moon, a firestorm spreads across the surface, transforming the rocky moonscape into green forests and blue oceans. The scene was created at Industrial Light and Magic, and is considered to be the first entirely computer-generated sequence in any feature film. ... pg 203 (Rickett R, 2007)The ILM division was separated so that the staff could push the development of computer graphics in a more commercial way. What they did for Star Trek was impressive at the time and they used this film clip to ascertain more funding to push the technology as far and as fast as possible as it still wasn't at high enough quality for what the more traditional film makers wanted.
While Matte World was being established to create classic original-negative painting's, ILM was developing the nascent possibilities of the computer. ILM's ear milestones included the "genesis sequence" of a barren planet transforming into a verdant world for Star Trek II (1982). That film also marked the first tentative steps for digital matte painting with Chris Evans creating texture maps of cloud formations, 2-D paintings on the computer that wrapped around the 3-D wireframe form of the Genesis Planet. Evans recalls how strange it was to work with an electronic paint pen that felt hot to the touch from the electric power pulsing through it. (Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C. 2004)
'"Everything about the project was new. The graphics pen that I painted with would get really hot, which made my hand sweat and the pen slip. As an artist there were all sorts of commands that weren't yet written. At that time the computer couldn't paint "soft" things like clouds; it was only good at heavy, solid colours. I would make suggestions about how the system could be improved from an artists point of view and the software guys could go off and write some new piece of code to help me."' Chris Evans ILM. pg 203 Rickett, RIt's important to note how different the industry was back then, ILM and Matte World were the too many competitors for the special effects, but now with the rise of indie film and the shear increase in volume of films being produced there are a lot of studio's that are smaller who are also producing great work. I think though the reason why the big companing like the ones who work on the new Star Wars special effects will always be the most notable in film history because they are the ones that have the money to trial and error these effects to perfection and spend money on software development which is what they could do back in the day after working on so many blockbusters.
The success of Star Wars ushered in a new era of visual effects, including the rebirth of VistaVision as the film format for visual effects photography. Having a similar industry-wide impact was ILM's "motion control" technology for computer-controlled repeatable camera moves, a breakthrough nearly a quarter century after MGM's Dupy Duplicator and Paramount's Repeater had been introduced and subsequently forgotten. pg 193 (Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C. 2004)
This quote is important as it mentions the motion control which meant you can have travelling mattes much easier with digital technology and led onto this development with 3D software. However it is very lengthy so I won't use it in the dissertation. Never the less it is interesting.
After Star Wars and Close Encounters, the auteur theory --- the concept that an entire production should evolve under a director's vision -- gained not merely a foothold but a beachhead. For visual effects, it meant the days when effects artists could work autonomously were numbered. "The reason I didn't work on Star Wars were numbered. "The reason I didn't work on Star Wars was George made it clear that whoever did the work would have nothing to say about the aesthetics and visual effects," Jim Danforth claimed. "I thought Lucas was wrong, but he had integrity and took responsibility for his own decisions, which hardly ever happens in Hollywood. But he and Spielberg spearheaded the auteur theory of filmmaking as it collided with visual effects. I'm of the school that thinks [production principles] don't need to know how we get there. They just need to tell us what their destination is supposed to be and stand back."
pg195 (Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C. 2004)
I thought this quote was super super interesting, although it is a little bit on a tangent but I do need to start focusing on where I'm going to be getting the nitty gritty theory from. Although I think I'm going to look at immersion and the sublime, but I also thought that this quote might be of importance as my first year essay was on the Auteur Theory. I think it's interesting that back in the day special effects people were much more important, probably because they didn't share there knowledge so there was a lot less of them, where as now you get whole hosts of them working on one shot alone so everyone has the team spirit, I think Jim Danforth does just come across like an arogant sod in this quote. I'm pretty sure if you did a sample of suggestions of improvements he would of considered them in a team effort at the end of the day it's his call for his film that's why he's director. Yeah there's less freedom but that's what you're getting paid to do, if it was Jim's film he'd get the responsibility of it all the freedom. I just thought it was interesting that it was the so called 'auteur theory' that brought this in. Not because there was more money involved and more of a reputation on the line for Lucas. Back to the start of digital matte painting.
But the digital future of matte painting really began on a sequence for young sherlock holmes (1985) in which a stained glass knight miraculously comes to life - marking the first time computer graphics (CG) animated character appears in a feature film.Chris Evans returned to the digital realm to create the initial shot of the sequence of the stained-glass knight springing off the window surface. Evans rendered the stained glass-glass window in acrylics, and it was scanned into the Lucasfilm Computer Division's Pixar system. The image marked the first time a painting was digitally manipulated, with Evans using Pixar's paint program, which included the capacity for digital airbrushing, cloning and colour correction. pg 213 (Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C. 2004)
'For Young Sherlock I did a number of paintings in the traditional way and we scanned them into the computer and combined them digitally,' explained Evans. 'For a sequence in which a computer-animated knight leapt out from a stained glass window, I painted the window in watercolours and then created the surrounding church environment as a separate oil painting. These elements were scanned into the computer where they were joined together. Where we had once spent all our time trying to blend matte lines - the elements where they were joined together - the computer actually allowed us to select colours from either painting and seamlessly blend the two elements across the matte line. It was a very exciting rime because it was just beginning to dawn on us how much computers were going to allow us to do in the future.' (Rickett, R. 2007) pg 204
http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/22847/looking-back-at-young-sherlock-holmes
This looks super fake, but shows some of the most primitive tools and shows the amount of work that went into the coding of the software to get it where it is today. So as you can see above they've change the opacity, for the animated part. Simple stuff like this was available. But i think it's interesting how the quote says it was really difficult to paint in soft strokes it was only possible in solid colours so they had to work together with the software guys to tell them from an artists perspective what could improve the software. I also think it's a funny little piece of trivia how hot the graphics pen got because you'd never get that today!! And it's important to note how once they'd used the software they knew that it was going to be a piece of the future.
The above article was a really interesting read on a look back of young sherlock holmes and it's relation possible inspiration on Harry Potter, I know it's a bit tenuous but if you're enjoying reading this blog then you will probably enjoy reading that article.
Bruce Walters, high on the creative potential of the emerging digital technology, showed Sean Joyce the Photoshop software, a demo that confirmed Joyce's decision to leave the company. Joyce's epiphany came when he saw how with photoshop, any image, from film footage to photographic stills, could be scanned into a computer and manipulated. "Photoshop freed you of 90 percent of the labour creating a matte painting, which is why I realised it was going to be the end of matte painting as we knew it. And I didn't want to be sitting in front of a computer. I'm a painter. But matte painting was moving into technicalism and not artistry. The artists were being ushered out and the technicians were being ushered in."pg217 (Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C. 2004)This was the first time I'd read about photoshop, and even though there are many other painting software's around today and modelling, photoshop was the first. I'm actually amazed they had graphic tablets back then I didn't realize they'd be developed so early, they look so funny: the pens connected with a wire and everything!
By the end of the decade the 2-D cut-and-paste technology was integrating three-dimensional computer graphics. For the 1999 release The Phantom Menace, the fourth installment in the Star Wars saga, Knoll supervised the pod race sequence, which represented the cutting edge in three-dimensional matte painting. "We took the approach of wanting to do scenes like the podrace as complex 3D matte paintings," Knoll explained. "It's tremendously difficult to make a completely computer-generated day-time environment look real, to generate everything from scratch on the computer. But doing it as a matte painting you can start with photography of real scenes, and [digitally] paint on it, you can steal textures. You can get richness from images that you can then blend and manipulate. pg 222 (Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C. 2004)
"The tools have more depth, so we can push harder," Knoll concluded. "I could always spot big-vista matte paintings, at least the ones that weren't skillfully done. There was always something flat about them. Now you can have 3-D scenes with dramatic camera moves through them! I feel we're free not to be able to make an image and not worry about matte lines or whether the colour is balanced. We can focus on the aesthetics of making a good shot." (Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C. 2004)
However it's quotes like the one above that make me question the boundary between animation and matte painting and special effects. I know to get good at something you have to put in hours and hours of practice but when all the techniques cross over surely its best to know a lot of tricks of the trade. I think this will be something I ask Matte Painter currently in industry when I email them.
"The invading army was the technical people who built the machines. At first we [artists[ were all confused - traditional matte painting and digital was a head-on collision. There was a lot of carnage. Then, eventually, the smoke cleared and it became clear what to do. What happened was artists who were afraid of the thing eventually said, 'step aside let me take a look at that.'" Robert Stromberg, digital matte painter. pg 225 (Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C. 2004)I really like this quote because it makes it seem that there was such a difference between that of traditional and digital matte painters, like it was a revolution when it occurred and the elders of the traditional tribes packed up leaving the youths to take over.
In many ways, the digital tools had the spirit of the old techniques. The 2-D software like Photoshop was a quicker, faster way of doing the cut-and-paste effects Micheal Pangrazio had been creating with slide-projected images. But despite the innovations there was no immediate breakthrough for digital matte painting there was no immediate breakthrough for digital matte painting until the computer-graphics animation revolution ushered in by Jurassic Park. pg 229 (Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C. 2004)
This quote is important for context, no it won't be included in the dissertation, but I think it's important to try and understand the time frame and appreciate that there was a time when matte painters and special effects folk didn't know whether digital could actually take over and everyone had different ideas of how long it would be.
But even at ILM there were some who felt the digital tools weren't ready for feature film production. ILM artist's such as Mark Sullivan were particularly wary as, with their artist's eye, they felt that scanning painting into a computer degraded the dynamic colour range of their work. "We did these digital test's at the time of Hook," Sullivan recalled. "To evaluate whether to use digital techniques on sweeping vista shots. I felt they were unsuccessful, there was a kind of cartoony look, like we'd photographed the painting off a TV monitor. At the time there was a move to replace painting techniques that when done correctly represent a beautiful process. It's like flying in a great old propeller plane but someone wants you to fly in a jet that's not yet reliable. No one could deny that at some point the digital tools would surpass traditional techniques but digital matte painting [in the early 1990's] didn't seem ready to compete with the beauty and clarity of an original-negative matte painting painting." pg 232 (Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C. 2004)It's obvious that this period of time really effected a lot of artist's, because to start off with the digital look was a lot cheaper, but ti so weird how we've gotten this pace of technology that is constantly improving so even in 2015 if you watch films four or five years ago the effects look cheap and noticeable in comparison to today. But they really stuck with it as the tale continues:
Illusion Arts also made a full transition to digital tools. For a Shadow shot of Lamont Cransto's mansion, Stromberg opted to scan a night time painting and repaint it for a daytime scene using digital paint alone, rejecting photographic elements that would of taken seconds to scan. 'I struggled on a [graphics input] tablet with a really slow computer. But I was trying to keep a painting. I painstakingly zoomed in, painting ever shingle and water gutter. It probably took about two weeks, but it was all hand painted in 2-D." pg243 (Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C. 2004)
I like the fact that this quote says it took two weeks to do a digital matte painting at first, i think that's just the thing though, yeah digital matte painting is know for being a fast process now because more and more people know the tricks of the trade, a decent matte painter back in the day traditionally could paint an amazing matte painting if they were classically trained but there first one probably also took a fortnight to paint. I think this context is required.
"Harrison Ellenshaw talked about being at a conference where everyone thought the film industry would go digital in ten years. Harrison thought it'd be twenty years. The whole industry changed in six months!" pg 243 (Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C. 2004)
This is a good quote as it put into context how quickly the industry developed, and the speed at what people pushed this new technology.
'When you're working on a physical glass painting there's definite danger. You can drop it and it could shatter - you can literally kill someone with a painting. The computer allows you to experiment and try things you never could traditionally, but it also allows you to screw up without any consequences, which dulls your edge." Brett Northcutt pg 244 (Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C. 2004)
I think this quote is a little extreme, obviously it can shatter, but unless the painter is a bit psycho and is going to go stab someone with one of the shards of glass.
At Illusion Arts we paint in the digital world much like the basic Whitlock technique. We start with big blocks of tone and colour and paint in layers with progressively finer detail, and the fine architecture goes in last. We'll still paint a sky, because sometimes nothing else will do. But we don't overlook the advantage of being able to use a piece of photography as a source for textures. We'll also build 3D Models, because it's just incredibly efficient, particularly if you're doing an office building. We've used £D extensively as decoration to 2-D shots. A good example of that is the pull back from the eyeball in Star Trek: First Contact, which was four enormous 2-D paintings connected with a lot of 3-D structures." pg 254 Bill Taylor (Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C. 2004)
Ultimately, whatever the technology, the soul-stirring challenge of emotionally moving an audience remains. A creative ethos guides the matte artist, producing the feeling Harrison Ellenshaw alludes to when he says, 'Ever painting that comes up on the screen you go, 'God there I am' - because you put your heart and soul into it." That passion is one of the intangibles handed down from matte painter to matte painter, one of the guiding forces that remains, whether an artist lovingly crafts a concept painting in oils, creates a traditional painting that will be scanned, constructs a scene entirely with software paint programs, or builds digital wireframes and textures them with scanned photographic elements."pg 255 (Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C. 2004)
Performing Illusions Dan North Quotes:
The computer was initially a 'backstage' tool for filmmakers, ameliorating the repetitive drudgeries of cartoon filmmaking by improving the mechanisms of the cel animation camera stand (Gentleman 1982:39), or by regulating the movements of motion control systems for special effects shooting where consecutive passes of the same camera moves were required to be composited in a single image. There were isolated experiments with motion control systems such as the Dup Duplicator, which recorded camera movements onto a phonograph disc but almost without exception, camera position had to be fixed for shots involving optically composited elements (see rickety 2000:118). 2001 used a mechanically controlled camera around a model spacecraft, shooting on frame at a time, meaning that the same moves could be repeated along the same track time and time again. pg 124
In these early days of computer-imaging, the interface was so complicated that making films depended on collaboration between artist and scientist, each assisting the other and creating a forced amalgamation of artistic input and precise mathematical procedure. With the support of major companies as Boeing and Bell Telephones, CG scientific and technical tools were seen as effective ways to test and develop the necessary software that could then be adapted for practical use. pg125
3D Example:
'The exteriors for The Truman Show were filmed in a small Florida town called Seaside.' recalls Barron. 'The whole town had been designed by the same architecht so it had a too-perfect almost surreal feel to it, which was ideal for the story of a man who unknowingly exists in the world's biggest film set. The real town only consisted of small residential buildings, but some scenes of the film required an equally perfect looking downtown area of larger office buildings. No suitable location could be found, so the production team decided to build it's own. The production designer planned the downtown area using a CAD [computer aided design program], and divided the actual creation of the buildings between partially built, full-scale sets on location and 3D digital extensions created at Matte World. pg 207
(Rickett, R. 2007)
The camera moves through that scene in the truman show, with this matte painting being made in 3D software this meant they could have matching camera movement. They used photoshop on the frames after to blend the two. Richard Rickett goes on to discuss about animated matte painting in the sense of flashing lights
(Rickett, R. 2007)
'There are many similarities between digital and traditional matte painting. The matte painter or a supervisor normally travels to the location to oversee photography of the live-action plate. While on location, the artist takes photographs of the surrounding environment and close-ups of interesting textures such as the brickwork or the buildings or the surface of rocks. These photographs not only serve as reference material for the artist during the creation of the matte painting, but may also be scanned and cloned to provide to provide textures for the digital image itself. 'A large part of digital matte painting is manipulating photographic elements that have been collected on location,' explains Craig Barron. 'There isn't too much point spending time painting something new if you can use a photograph of a real object. Digital matte paintings are often a collage of photographic elements woven together with digitally painted original elements. That may make creating a digital matte painting sound easy, but it's no easier than producing a convincing image by gluing together lots of photo's that have been cut out of a magazine.' (Rickett, R. 2007)
So I think this quote will be repeated in the process and production quote blog post of matte painting,
but I think it's important, well i really like how digital matte painting is summed up as gluing and sticking pictures, I think this is a cynical way of looking at it but true.
other issues made easier: - This list I want to try and include before the end of the chapter or at least skirt on just to show why digital is better, because i'm very biased in wanting to run with traditional techniques.
- can paint directly on top
- don't need to worry about matte lines, due to cloning tool
- can rotoscope around live action footage and make it animated to make sure live action footage isn't cut by matte line.
- layers in digital matte painting means brush strokes are reversible
- 3-D software allows for sophisticated camera movements through the scene much cheaper than set building for a live action film yet still can be atmospheric. e.g the truman show
- cut and pasting / cloning
Paragraph plan:
- moon genesis & textures
- young sherlock holmes stained glass window
- artistry and technicians, traditional matte painters leaving the industry digital matte painting being like gluing and sticking
- 3d mapping and wire framing for star wars pod race
- gone on to say could be animation more practical use of it in the truman show
- end quote "It all comes back to the same principles matte artists were working with half a century go - composition and lighting, things that make a good shot.' Huston concluded. "While the Craft is different, the problems are the same." (Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C. 2004)
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