Matte Painting

I'm creating a matte background for my friend's music video and wanted to show the process. This is the first time I've tried photorealistic backgrounds and I've definitely always admired this art in movies, i.e. The Lord of The Rings!


1. Paint a 2-minute layout to determine color scheme and, well, layout. With this scheme I'm wanting to keep colors muted and and bit desaturated to give it a vintage fairytale feel. It would have been really cool to make a completely illustrated background, giving it a real storybook theme, but I'll have to make that another project...ooooh.










2. Make the changes based on the director's...directions, plus an extra that won't make the cut. I was tired and loopy.









3. Clean up template. The foreground hill isn't part of the background, so I painted it out to get a better idea of what I need to create.









4. Get to workin'. Adding in images, creating images, color correcting, masking, painting, erasing, basically utilizing every tool in Photoshop.









5. Images, images, images. Refer to #4









6. Create some extras to add a bit of whimsy, at least, I think it does.









7. Final!









8. Winterized for season changes throughout the video.









9. And testing it out for fun!