Hairspray
T his is a shot of an aerial view of 1960′s Baltimore for the opening sequence of the 2007 feature, Hairspray. The shot initially began as a helicopter shot of present day Baltimore, but all modern architectural elements and non-period buildings had to be removed to transform the city to a 1960’s version.
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.