Pepe and Lucas - Matte Paintings - The sky is no longer the limits.

Alright peeps, this post is matte paintings only! Usually, my matte paintings consist of just sky replacements, but this time I had to create a bunch of environments to go with it.

Fortunately, I had a little help from the modeling department - special thanks to Christie Arnold for modeling buildings and giving me some renders to work with.

Pepe and Lucas starts on open sky and the camera tracks downward until we land on the front of the pub. We only built the first couple of rows of buildings and I had to paint in the rest.

This was my rough version before getting started.

My final version. I ended up having to go in and add on to many of the buildings to vary up the architecture a bit. I also warped the rows a little so everything has a little undulation to them. This was also an opportunity to show that the action doesn't take place in the most prosperous area. I put in the wealthier area on the left. I also added foliage from time to time to help break up the monotony of buildings.

I included this painting because the lighting situation changed on me and it ended up going in a totally different direction. You can see from the unfinished sky matte that we didn't get too far. This will be more apparent in the color keys I created and I'll go into more detail then, but originally, we planned to set out story during magic hour after a pouring rain, which would really pop the outdoor lights and reflected colors. You can see (above) how the darker and cooler values would have made the square a clear focus with all the light coming from it. However, it became very difficult to maintain focus once we were on ground level and things just looked so noisy and there were render problems with all the reflections, etc., etc. In the end we opted for magic hour on a clear day with some gentle clouds floating in the sky. Essentially, everything brightened up. This actually benefited us in the end as the world became less moody, in contrast to Pepe who's personal world had become darker. Just a note, but I did this painting earlier than the opening shot, so we'd already established the new lighting scenario by that time. It would have been killer to redo two complex matte paintings.

One of the things I focused on in these wide shots was adding onto the scenery so that it looked like a vast metropolitan city.  This meant adding rows and rows of buildings and varying up the architecture, which I came to enjoy a lot. A lot of little ladders here and there, extra chimneys, balconies, and trees. Something about adding trees to a city makes it feel much more cosy, no matter how much endless concrete surrounds it. I guess it just adds that little extra bit of life.

I think that's virtually all the visual development I contributed to for Pepe and Lucas. It was a total blast! I always liked that working at Brain Zoo allowed me to constantly move from project to project, but I really enjoyed working on this project for such a long period, allowing me to really expand and refine this world.

In my future posts, I'll be sharing the lighting and color directions we took as well as developing the movie poster. Stay tuned.

Marvel's Iron Man and Hulk - Heroes United

I had the tremendous pleasure of working on a Marvel project recently at Brain Zoo. With the success of the Avengers and Iron Man franchises, we were hired to animate a dvd feature film starring Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk. My main responsibilities on this project included creating lighting studies to help establish the mood as well create several matte paintings for production.

Before beginning production, we did a test sequence, which can be found in the movie in various parts, of Iron Man fighting Zaxx at night. With limited time and budget and an emphasis on glowing effects, we took a very graphic approach. To help pop the effects, the movie takes place entirely at night except for the final scenes. We used primary colors a lot for the outdoor scenes -  an epic red dusk leading to a night sky to pop out a red and yellow Iron Man and a green Hulk. I didn't end up handling the lighting studies for the interior, but they're often dark rooms illuminated by the main superheroe's complimentary colors, red light and green light.  

Some of the above keys are a little bit styled. At the time, we considered having more 2D comic effects,  like speed lines for flight scenes and energy trails for Iron Man's boot/hand repulsers. We ended up abandoning those ideas, but the show ended up getting a nice 2D look, and no wonder, our creative director Leo worked on Tron Uprising!

When I'm tasked with developing color keys for a movie, a lot of times I'll go through the animatic and choose frames from key moments in the story or action that can guide the lighters through the rest of the shots and do really rough color keys. If time permits, I'll bring them to the level of the above keys or higher. This is helpful for the Brain Zoo team, but especially for discussing lighting ideas with clients.

Below are the matte paintings I created for production.

 A gamma explosion goes off outside city limits.

We were able to use one global sky matte for most of the film, but there were a few shots that required their own unique painting.  I painted in the shield helicarrier for guidance.

 Hulk and Iron Man fall from the Shield helicarrier to a graveyard just outside of town. There was only a center of town model that was an enclosed environment, so for all the wide above shots showing a whole town, I had to paint the town form scratch.

 Amazing, for one or two seconds, Hulk jumps up to the helcarrier from left to right, which of course requires a new matte painting since we have no real 3D town.

 Iron Man being chased by missiles flies by came in a wide arc and back again.

 The movie ends on a new dawn over the town. You can see a frame from the movie below. A lot of times my matte paintings sit way in the background and there's so many effects or such camera movement, you can't really pick any of the details out, but you get a nice uninterrupted shot here. I even separated the clouds out so they could be animated.