Matte Painting Workshop Kshitij Vivan Institute, Ahmedabad

By Author: Kshitij Vivan Institute
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What is Matte Painting?
A matte painting is a use of paintings to present unrealistic situations or it is a presentation of an unrealistic location, set or landscape with the help of painting that allows filmmakers to create the illusion of an environment or location that is impossible to present at filming location. Basically, it is a technique that mixes art and live actions to create the illusion.
Without this, it is too expensive or difficult to film live or make a film.

The basic principle of matte printing is that the scene's part is masked off with digital cropping or green material.

Nowadays, all T.V. serials and movies use matte paintings to make the film more attractive and realistic. The Wizard of Oz, The Birds, the original Star Wars films, Mary Poppins, Titanic, Nagin T.V. serial, are some of the best examples of matte paintings.

In these movies, paintings are used to create the illusion of a village, massive artefacts, night sky etc. Matte paintings are a traditional and very useful technique in the film industry.

Instead of spending so much money on different places, ...
... locations, matte paintings are best to create the illusion of that place or environment at that location.

Where Matte Paintings are used?

Matte painters use various techniques & tools to combine a matte-painted image with live-action scenes according to film makers instructions. At its best, depending on the artist or painters they create the environments that would otherwise be impossible or expensive to film. In many movable scenes we watch, the painting part is static, and movements are combined with it to make it movable.

Matte Painting is one of the oldest techniques in the visual effects industry and one of the most widely applied methods as well. The concept of matte painting is simple in which we use one or more paintings to replace the background."

The concept of matte painting is so simple and quite skilful and demanding because the paintings used to replace background have to be realistic enough and go with film styles so that the audience can relate it with reality or they think this is real.

Matte Painting is used in Different areas:-
• In Movies
• In T.V. Serials
• In Games
• In Images

How Matte Painting Works?

Matte paintings are created in two ways. Nowadays, most matte paintings are made in computer programs in which live actions are composite digitally with tools' help. Traditional matte paintings use painted scenes like the illusion of the live movement happening in the painted background.

The original technique involved painting a scene which is unrealistic on a sheet of glass with the help of paint, and leaving the glass plan where the live actions can be inserted later.

How Concept Art Works?
Concept art is a term in which it is used to showcase ideas so that modellers, animators, and VFX teams can make these ideas ready for production. The artist must bring the new ideas to bring life in his artwork . A concept artist has to create new ideas frequently based on specific creative briefs, and the work has to be done fast.

Matte paintings Nowadays:-
Matte Painting is inserting live action shots into a painted unrealistic world, is widely used in nearly every film made. But with time changing matte paintings are also varied and become digital where all old matte paintings originate as paintings on glass.

Modern matte painters use different digital tools and techniques to create digital matte paintings, including scanning photographs or images of handmade artwork, pure glass paintings, collage of images etc.

Modern matte artists can easily create entire landscapes or small set pieces such as statues or buildings digitally that can be used while shooting any film.

Digital matte paintings are created to change the landscape to turn into the night sky, turn the single background into thousands of people like in bahubali movies, change a sunny sky to monsoon one, and easily manipulate any footage or shot.

Best Matte Painting Examples in Bollywood:-

• Bahubali
• Dhoom 3
• Chennai Express
• Om Shanti Om
• Bhagg Milkha Bragg

Conclusion:-

Matte Painting is one of the oldest techniques in the visual effect or film industry and one of the most applicable techniques. The concept is straightforward- it's like uses of more than one Painting to create an unrealistic platform. One can learn matte paintings from any reputed institute as the demand for matte artistes are increasing day by day.