Saturday 7 December 2013

Corfe Castle Matte Painting

Well its been a while since my last update due to a very hectic start to year 3 at Bournemouth University. I have assignments coming at me from all directions it seems, and here's the first of them.This has probably been my favorite project to undertake so far at Bournemouth, as it had a great balance between artistic abilities and technical know how, as well as being our first Photoshop based project and was taught by the excellent Adam Redford and Melania Foderitto. The brief was to create a photo-real matte painting in Photoshop and then bring it to life using camera projection in Nuke.

After about 11 aborted attempts to emulate overly epic matte paintings such as those by David Luong and Damien Mace and create a piece from scratch, I decided to learn to walk before running and work from a photographed backplate. After 2 trips to Winchester, 1 to Christchurch and 1 to Lyndurst I found Corfe Castle, a fantastic location to photograph a plate with my new Cannon 600D. Going in half term was perhaps not the best idea as the place was swarming with people and screaming children, but I managed to take enough decent photographs to work with. I decided to use the village square as the composition rather than the Castle itself  (which I added to the hill in the background) as it was the only really open area within the village (one of the draw backs of historical towns). I set to painting out various people, cars, and anything which would seem out of place for a period piece.

Here you can see the image I ended up with:




And here is the video of the projection, including a quick breakdown of the patching and projection process:




Corfe Castle Matte Painting from Gordon Marshall on Vimeo.


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