This past May, I worked at Motion Theory producing enhanced backgrounds and set extensions for at set of three AT&T commercials based around the urban gymnastic sport, Parkour.  The individual commercials were called, “Friends”, “Around the House”, and “Movement”.  The above image is one my favorites for these spots, from “Friends”, which was unfortunately only briefly used as an inset on a lap top screen.  See the raw untreated plate to the left.

Two of these commercials can currently be seen online at the website of the designers, Sanders\Wingo Advertising.  To view “FRIENDS” or “AROUND THE HOUSE”, click the name.

Honestly, I have nothing against the Eiffel Tower or Paris! It just seems that every modern disaster movie has to destroy this landmark, including an unnamed, and as yet unmade, broadcast feature I was briefly contracted to develop concepts for.  The movie was about a “gravity weapon”, the after effects of it’s misuse, and the struggle of the good guys to put an end to the machine and its perpetrators.

In the above image, the hero is racing around the world trying to put a stop this gravity weapon, and finds himself caught in it’s after effect, an inverted gravity “push”, while flying a helicopter over Paris.  He suddenly has to fly for his life through the floating Eiffel Tower itself!  Also, freak weather accompanies these “pushes”.

Two more concept images to follow shortly.

End of Nations is a soon to be released MMORTS (massively multiplayer online real-time strategy) game. If you were a PC gamer in the late 1990′s you probably played Total Annihilation, and if you enjoyed it as much as I did, then you’ll probably love this game as well.

At Farmer Brown, I got the opportunity to work on the CG trailer for the game; designed to introduce and advertise the game at E3 and to act as an early cinematic.  I created matte paintings of destroyed New Jersey docks to be projected on 3D geometry for the NY fight sequence, and well as creating the 2D middle part of the destroyed London overhead/pullout shot. The central part of the shot was created in 3D by another artist, I just destroyed in the rest.  Check out the new game trailer below.

In late 2009 I got the opportunity to work at Pixomondo on the feature, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief as a digital matte painter. The studio was awarded the shots of the reverse underworld version of Los Angeles. As an internal joke, the famous Hollywood sign changes to ‘Hellywood’ once Percy and friends pass through it, but this is not obvious in the movie.

One of my first duties was finalizing the matte painting for the above shot. The matte painting had been under development by at least three (count ‘em) other artists before I came on board the project. I was handed two pages of type written notes in an 8-point font to address before beginning anything. Most of the notes were in regard to the city and the lighting, but I had to completely redevelop the cliffs for the open chasms. Above is the actual background matte painting I worked on.

One of my specialties seems to be rocky cliffs, which I had to develop for these shots, as the show VFX Sup and Director had as specific look in mind – long jagged vertical faces. I sourced an island in Tasmania which I’ve used in the past (Underworld: Evolution), and everybody was pleased. So my responsibilities for the two shots below were just for the cliffs. The city and sky were developed by a combination of either Thilo Ewers, Richard Lee, or Matt Conway. The matte paintings were projected in 3D by John Lindstein, and rendered out for comp.

See the three finished shots below.

I created matte paintings for several shots, including a large (12K x 4.7K) horizontal aerial image for the opening shot with the aircraft, a large (8K x 12K) vertical aerial image for the drop with the paratroopers, a tree top image (3.8K x 2.9K) when the troopers begin to land, and a large horizontal forested landscape (above, 9.6K x 2.7K)  for use in the main shots. All of these matte paintings were created with use in 3D projection and compositing in mind. Meaning, I worked through masks/alphas in Photoshop to generate the images, a process I normally employ.  Working through this method is particularly challenging with trees and other organic twisted multi-armed  shapes.

I also created several look development images to translate the look/feel of the forest from the initial impressionistic concept images to something more photographic. One being shown above along with the concept. I went through several revisions to get the desired look, which many times was lesson in reading between the lines, as direction was often conflicting and multi-sourced.

The 30-second spot began airing Oct. 5, 2009 on the Adult Swim, BET, Comedy Central, ESPN, ESPNews, FX, FOX Soccer, G4, MTV, NFL, Speed, Spike TV, TBS, USA and History channels.

“Space Command” is a national USAF commercial that pushes the idea “that the future is happening today”, meaning, even while this commercial is all sci-fi and shtuff, it implies that high-tech futuristic warfare is actually the norm in modern military. It shows what happens when two pieces of space junk collide, sending debris on a collision course with a vital communications satellite, and the space borne USAF personnel’s quick reaction.

On the third day, I created earth.  Or, actually high resolution textures for the “earth”.  The direction was to not depict any recognizable land masses, so I combined several continents together, and generated separate interrelated maps for the land, water, and clouds.  On the seventh day I rested, and and sanctified it.

The 30-second spot aired in late 2009 on the Adult Swim, BET, Comedy Central, ESPN, ESPNews, FX, FOX Soccer, G4, MTV, NFL, Speed, Spike TV, TBS, USA and History channels.  Another interesting fact of these commercials is that they feature actual Air Force personnel, and not professional actors . . .

In May of 2009, I worked on a national Air Force commercial at Psyop, which highlights the technology of the Air Force unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). It aired nationally the week of 6.30.09 in television markets and select movie theaters across the country. The “UAS” commercial depicts a futuristic look at war and how what was once considered science fiction is now reality for the U. S. Air Force.

I created one very large (6K x 2.7k) matte painting of a barren Mars-like mountainous landscape (above), as well as three other supporting/related matte paintings and sky assets for this commercial. Shown are three of the matte paintings, four stills from the film using these matte paintings, as well as the commercial itself.

]]> http://timmatney.com/?feed=rss2&p=1132 0 http://timmatney.com/?p=1109 http://timmatney.com/?p=1109#comments Wed, 19 Aug 2009 01:13:46 +0000 admin http://timmatney.com/newsite/?p=1109 From February to April in 2009 I was employed primarily as a Digital Matte Painter at LLP Digital, Inc. working on The Storm. The Storm is a two-part broadcast feature about a weather manipulation weapon, the people who want it, the people who want to stop it, and the consequences of its misuse. It aired July 26 and August 2 on NBC.

Shown here are a composite of a tornado assaulting Anchorage, AK and the assosciated plate, a matte painting of a very snowy Las Vegas, the Taj Mahal (also very snowy) and it’s plate, a multi-car pile up, and a major news network anchor desk.

From February to April in 2009 I was employed primarily as a Digital Matte Painter, but also Concept Artist and Storyboard Artist at LLP Digital, Inc. working on The Storm. The Storm is a two-part broadcast feature about a weather manipulation weapon, the people who want it, the people who want to stop it, and the consequences of its misuse. It aired July 26 and August 2 on NBC.

I primarily concepted VFX related to this weather weapon. The weapon was fired from the ground using and array of “satellite” dishes, which would have a strange electrical/energy effect with the atomosphere upon contact. Of course man shouldn’t mess with mother nature, and great holes began tearing in the atmosphere on their own, also with the strange electrical/engergy effect, letting in ultraviolet rays and space radiation which would basically cook anything in contact. Also, the weather becomes violently screwy!

Shown are an example each of the concepts I made exploring the look of the firing weapon, the resulting holes in the atmosphere/ionosphere, and some of the crazy weather. I generally created 4 to 10 examples for each required effect.

I contributed storyboards for the VFX sequences requiring the most organization and interaction between Production and Post. Represented here are two sets of storyboards, each representing only the VFX, but not any separate character dialogue or interaction. The first storyboard involves an ambulance’s escape from an oncoming twister, and the next three concern the weather weapon’s attack through a sand storm on a group of Afghani insurgents.

On Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, I worked at Digital Domain texturing two of the Decepticon “Kitchen ‘Bots” – a transforming Nespresso Le Cube and a Garbage Disposal, as well as assisting on a transforming Dyson Vacuum Cleaner. The robots were both easy and difficult to texture; easy in that the models had so many pieces, and difficult because the models had so many pieces! The images shown here include stills from the film, texture review images, and some of the textures.

The bulk of my tasks as a Digital Matte Painter on this project involved inflicting meteor impact damage on large cities and various environments, as well as creating straightforward background plates for multiple establishing shots. All of the environment matte paintings displayed here are not final, and have not been composited with actors or effects elements.

From June to December 2008 I was employed at LLP Digital, Inc. primarily as a Digital Matte Painter, but also Concept Artist, on Meteor. Which is a four-hour miniseries where scientists discover that the giant meteor Kassandra, approximately three times the size of Mt. Everest, has been knocked out of its orbit and is now barreling straight for Earth, as showers of smaller meteorites begin to lay waste to major cities around the globe. It aired in two parts on July 12th and 19th on NBC.

In these storyboards, I helped concept and organize the primary VFX shots for the final act of the second installment of the feature. These boards concern only the VFX, and not any separate character dialogue or interaction. You can see how my storyboards affected the movie in the clip below!

Some of my more recent work comes from, Meteor, a two-part broadcast feature about giant mountainous meteors assaulting the Earth and mankind’s fight back.

For this film, I was involved not only as a Digital Matte Painter, but as a Concept Artist and Storyboard Artist. When I came onboard the project, many parts of the look and style of these giant 60-mile wide meteors were yet to be determined. So I was given the task of concepting the general shape, what the surface looked like, how it behaved in motion, and how it might act when reaching Earth’s atmosphere.

Another of my duties included creating clean backplates for many of the desert fight sequences. In other words, removing the actors and dudes in green pajamas so that they can be replaced or integrated with the visual effects. I worked on over 20 such shots. Shown here are stills from the film, the clean plates I created, as well as the original plates.  One may ask, why weren’t clean plates simply shot during production?  But then we wouldn’t have movie magic, would we! 

One of my duties on the feature film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, was to concept the textured look of a WWII German U-Boat and an ocean liner so that my supervisors could determine the design wanted. I took a flat shaded image of a 3D model, and worked on top of it to create the finished look. Shown is one of 10 styles I created for the U-Boat.

My main employment was as a Texture Artist, surfacing ships and some of the digital “old man” Brad Pitt. Shown here is the ocean liner seen in the sequence where Benjamin takes the young Daisy on an early morning boat ride in the fog, and the “Chelsea” herself in her war paint.

For the feature, The Golden Compass, I worked with the Visual Effects Supervisor to create several look development concepts for the Ice Bridge set piece in order to dial in its crystalline hard yet fragile nature. Then I actually created six 2D animated cracking textures for use inside the bridge itself. All within Adobe Photoshop.

It was determined that converting this shot into a large-scale digital matte painting would be more effective than tracking myriad painted elements into the shot. Besides mysef, four other matte painters, modelers, and texture artists created this 2.5D matte painting.

My responsibilities included in-house supervision and set up of the projected digital matte painting process, as well as creating digital matte paintings for the close-up buildings at the end of the shot. Photoshop, Maya and Mental Ray were used to execute the process.

These are three concepts I did for the 2007 film, The Seeker: The Dark is Rising.

They depict The Rider’s passage, literally spreading “The Dark” over the landscape. It was initially thought that “The Dark” should be a creeping hard yet liquid substance which consumes all. However, probably due to budgetary constraints, this effect was not used in the film, where instead The Rider uses blizzards, water and ice to this end.

Based on the acclaimed fantasy novel by Susan Cooper, this is the first film adaptation of the author’s acclaimed The Dark Is Rising Sequence.

This is a digital matte painting I did for two related Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing commercials, “Fairground “ and “Neighborhood “. I used several projected matte paintings to give the impression of passing out of this valley over hilly terrain, while maintaining the feeling of a 2D bottle label.

I worked closely with another matte painter, Patrick Mullane, who contributed the sky for this image.

This is the 2007 Michelin commercial, “

You may also view my model at Michelin’s themed website, MICHELINMAN.COM. Go into “THE LOUNGE” to find a making-of documentary on the commercial.

]]> http://timmatney.com/?feed=rss2&p=787 0 http://timmatney.com/?p=773 http://timmatney.com/?p=773#comments Thu, 13 Aug 2009 04:53:13 +0000 admin http://timmatney.com/newsite/?p=773 As a Texture Artist, I used Adobe Photoshop and Right Hemisphere Deep Paint to create digital doubles of the stunt men who portrayed Roman soldiers during the production of the film, Night at the Museum, including their weapons, armor, clothing, and not least, themselves. These digital doubles were used to populate an entire miniature legion! ]]> http://timmatney.com/?feed=rss2&p=773 0 http://timmatney.com/?p=596 http://timmatney.com/?p=596#comments Wed, 12 Aug 2009 23:34:11 +0000 admin http://timmatney.com/newsite/?p=596 For this shot from Underworld: Evolution, I used camera projection techniques to turn a locked off plate into a fully “3D” hallway set, filling in all of the many (at least 75%) details that were unseen within the plate.

55 frames of movie magic!

Images present are of the wireframe over the projected plate, the plate itself, and the 3D texture after projection.

While this may not be a traditional matte painting, I feel it’s an example of the kind of “3D” matte painting becoming more and more required in today’s post production.

The Cave

The large image (with digital/rubber monster) was quite difficult to execute, and required the hard work of many people, which paid off, as it is one of the best visual effects shots of the film. I created the background using as set of 3 different mattes, each painted in perspective, and mapped on to 3D planes for rendering.

In the other shots I created background matte paintings, with the actress, Piper Perabo, and slice of set she’s on are the only “real” elements visible. The “Charlie’s Death” sequence for this show was quite challenging, as the physical set was VERY limited, and required over 36 individual 2D and 2.5D set extensions and mattes.

I textured the “Cruiser Liner”, which was supposed to be the Titanic (but not). We received the model for this asset from the main SCATWOT post facility, and I wound up having to texture it completely from scratch three different times to please the Director and Producer team. Many times it was like painting the real thing with a 3” paint brush!

The Firefly Man is a pagan fairy tale that celebrates the cycle of life and death through the story of an elderly hermit who is isolated by loss and then transformed by reunion. The production utilized an unusual and experimental combination of animation techniques including an animatronic version of an eighteenth century form of Japanese puppetry: bunraku, which requires multiple puppeteers operating manual rods for intricate lifelike movements. The puppets were animated from within miniature models, backdrops and sculptural elements, and then layered with 2D and 3D digital animations. The goal of uniting these disparate techniques was to merge them both visually and conceptually while paying tribute to the historical and contemporary processes of storytelling though animation. Since the eleven-minute short has no dialogue, the story is conveyed through sequential happenings compromised of classic symbols and southern gothic archetypes. Production was completed in October of 2002.

MAKING OF

The animated short initially started as an in-house promotional piece for Alternate Route Studios in Cary, NC where the Director/Writer, Todd Fjelsted, and I were employed together – he as a scenic artist and I as a digital artist. We were put together to develop the project, and found ourselves a good creative match! Sadly, after initial development, the studio decided not to continue the short. But Todd and I, already immersed in the film, decided the project still had vast merit, so chose to continue developing the project ourselves, and were fortunate enough to gain the “official” blessing and support of the studio.

Even with this generous offer from our employer, it was difficult to internally find all the resources and people necessary to continuously develop the film, so we had to seek outside support and talent to join the production. We gained surprisingly enthusiastic response at every turn, and eventually the production turned into a vast “community arts project”, with artists and individuals from many different disciplines and walks of life contributing their time and talent to making The Firefly Man come to life.

Of course, my responsibilities included all aspects of post production! Where as VFX Supervisor/Director, I not only acted as lead 3D artist, but directed a team of five talented students in their first filmmaking experience, ensuring a consistent style and level of quality throughout. As well as 3D Supervision, I also handled many 2D tasks; creating matte paintings, rear-screen backdrops, and compositing some of the most difficult shots. As Producer, and with some key ARS help, I managed and developed The Firefly Man’s access and distribution to film festivals nationally and world wide.

BROADCAST AND DISTRIBUTION

As part of their Virtue and Vice Film Season, The Firefly Man played before the film, Black Narcissus, on Saturday July 7th, 2007 at the Sainsbury Wing Theatre of the The National Gallery in London (UK).

The Firefly Man has been nationally broadcast on The Sundance Channel on January 7th-28th and and September 23-26th, 2006.

The film was officially released on DVD in shorts! volume 2 from The Film Festival Collection in October, 2004. The DVD is a diverse group of award winning short films showcased at film festivals all over the globe. Featuring some of the best shorts seen at the Aspen ShortsFest, Cannes Film Festival, Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Starz Denver International Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, and more . . .

The Firefly Man was first broadcast online at AtomFilms.com in March, 2004, and was in their top 20 animated drama downloads for some time, but is not longer available for viewing. It has also received consistently high viewer ratings throughout. AtomFilms (Atom Entertainment) works with creative independent content developers to find and publish the very best casual games, short films, and video. You can view the film in streaming Windows Media or RealPlayer formats, and check out some of the great reviews it’s received while there.

The Firefly Man was an official selection of the following film festivals:

In 2001 I worked on two commercials, “Flood” and “Harvest”, which were developed by ad agency Howard, Merrell & Partners as part of a larger branding campaign for SAS Institute, and were directed by Richard Taylor.

They were designed to emphasize SAS’ position as a global leader in data analysis software (Big Brother), and began airing in national markets briefly around Jan. 22, 2002. One ad depicts a rainy cityscape and the other a vast wheat field. In both scenarios, digital information generated in the course of e-commerce overwhelms business people wading through the deluge.

I used Maya and Photoshop to develop and animate the falling “Data Rain” word sequences, particle effects, and related animated “Data Tornado” burst. As well as modeling and texturing several skyscrapers for the wide shots.

These commercials were produced at a Raleigh, NC area company called Alternate Route Studios, which had risen out of the ashes of a game studio I was also employed at called, SouthPeak Interactive. SouthPeak was actually an onsite subsidiary of SAS, and due to the Full Motion Video games (remember those?) we produced, our facilities and personnel were already geared toward commercial and broadcast production. So it was decided to restructure the company for this purpose. Basically, I changed jobs without so much as even changing desk chairs.