Digital Matte Painting: Thematic Matte Painting (VFX)

on

3/04/26 - 15/10/26 (Week 1-Week 6)

Chika Clarissa Widjaja / 0378636

Character Design/ Bachelors Of Design (Creative Media) / Taylor's University

Digital Matte Painting: Invisible Set Extension (PRODUCTION)


TABLE OF CONTENTS

  • TASK
  • FEEDBACK
  • REFLECTION

TASK


Story Board
I drew a simple storyboard on how I want the animation/camera movements to look like to help me visualize before starting.







Photoshop
After receiving feedback, the teacher suggests to go with the third matte painting. I began in Photoshop to seperate each layers. I also added an additional floating mountains behind the cave so when animating, the other areas aren't empty. I color correct each mountain to make it well blended into the environment.




After Effects
Then, I moved on to After effects to begin animating. I did the same steps as my previous digital mattes that I did in this module, by making all the layers 3D, and seperate each layer to different Zdepths depending on how far each other is to create depth later on.



After re scaling every layer, I added a camera, and started to animate the camera movements based on my storyboard. I create a slow zoom in for the first 5 seconds by using Position. I wanted to show a bit of the mountain thats being covered with the cave, so I animate panning the camera from left to right. 


  • For additional animations, I animated the fog moving slowly across the ocean and sky. I also made a subtle animation on the floating mountains, where it moves towards the bottom a bit.



I also used a green screen moving cloud video instead of animating a picture because it would be more realistic, since clouds move in a certain way instead of just straight line. I downloaded a high quality green screen video from youtube: (https://youtu.be/xRGd9Af49gQ?si=wTiRz2ys7DB1_e2l ) and imported it to after effects. Then, I use Keylight and eyedrop the color to the green screen so it became transparent.





Sound Production
Finally, I searched for a background sound from avatar that suits my environment, and ambience music. Here are the sounds I used:

I want to have a background sound that isn't too heavy (intense sounds), supports the environment, and also ambience sounds to support the realism of the video. 



Final Results
 




Compiled Technical Doc






REFLECTION

I really enjoyed my time learning this course. I've always wondered how people made pictures look 3D whenever I see videos on youtube. It was interesting to learn the history of matte painting, and to find out most of my favorite movies were using matte paintings. Now, I know how to make them myself in after effects which is reallllyyy cool. Throughout this course and assignment,  I faced some difficulties when importing to after effects. Some of my layers/objects looks bad, or my shading isn't right, so I had to go back and forth like 50 times to fix some of the changes. Even when I thought it's all good and exported the video, I still find some mistakes, which I had to redo. But it's all part of the process and I really enjoyed seeing the results. Overall, I'm glad I gained lots of new insights and skills throughout my journey learning this module.







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