Hi Everyone,
First Post here.
This is a matte painting I did for the show Eli Stone. The client wanted to see San Francisco in the year 2048. I was happy to hear they were thrilled with the result. The full shot is actually a huge camera move. Thanks to all the CG artists and compositors who helped out to make it possible.
hey welcome to this matte painting forum, it would be great if we can see a video sequence and a what you tools/techniques you used to achieve the final effect,
it looks great I like it all, I would have done a little stronger the light on the buildings coming from the sun , and some highlight on the roofs as well, great image tell us more!
Hello Jaime,
Thanks for the kind words. Oh! Before I forget, do you know Hugo Martin? I have met him a few times at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects and he has mentioned you before.
On to the Matte Painting-
It all began when the VFX supervisor explained the shot to me. The main character, Eli, has a hallucination of seeing his hometown in the year 2048. I was shown some concept art as a guide and then handed a drive of literally hundreds of photos taken from the top of a building in downtown LA. I chose several dozen that I thought would make a good base and merged them using Photoshop CS4 in several passes. Trying to do it in one pass always ended up crashing the software. Though I would love to one day make a machine give out a big puff of black smoke! I think that would be fun as long as it didnt belong to me. Anyway…after merging them, I manually removed all distortion and color corrected the seperate elements in the image since the were taken at several hours apart I believe. This was tricky since the Photomerge nearly turned them all into one image basically.
At this point, it was all about finding good reference of SF and other cool architecture. Im thankful to the VFX supervisor for allowing me alot of creative freedom in this shot. I hacked, slashed, color corrected, and made up some of my own buildings to populate the scene and did my best to make sure it no longer looked like LA and a believable SF 2048. I ended up using alot of day photos and adjusted to them to look like dawn since it was easier to find reference and gave me more control. Oh, I should say that other than the Photo merging, the rest of the painting was done in CS2. I don’t really like the new tabbed interface of CS4. The painting ended up being a bit over 10K.
Oh, I did add some highlightis to the building like you had recomended but I was told to get rid of it. Maybe I went too far the first time and too subtle in the end.
The painting was then handed off to CG artists to populate the extreme foreground with CG building since projecting the those parts of the painting wouldn’t hold up to the large camera move. Composting then took over to do their magic and bring the shot to life.
Thanks for the interest in the shot and again, thats to the before mentioned CG artists and compositors who gave this shot life.
I will try to post a video of the shot.
hey Charles, of course I know Hugo Martin a great friend and artist here at Blur, ( every friday we hang out and have some beer very well deserved lol 
) thanks for sharing some info about this image , looking forward to see the final video
Nice scenery! Cool light. This is right my favourite time when the sky is still light, but city lights are allready turned on.
But what’s the grey myst near horizon in the background? I does’t like it.
Yup! That’s the bay covered with heavy fog. I saw some reference of SF from my friend who is a photographer that pointed me in that direction but to be honest, I was worried about the gray look too. But my VFX supe grew up in SF and he didn’t bring anything up. Neither did the client. If those two are happy, I aint complaining.
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