Hey guys!
I'm really glad you liked the Matte painting test!
In the meantime we started working on the big ones so here's how that went.
I bought a big sheet of 3mm plexiglass, and had it cut to proper dimensions. (the glass looks blue because the protective foil is still on)
We settled for 150x70cm (5x2.3 feet). I also made the frames so it would be easier to handle, and painted them black because everything is much cooler when painted black.
For the big ones Stipan decided to use oil paint, and since oil dries slower than acrylic we decided he should paint two of them at the same time: when one dries he can work on the other one.
He is painting it in layers, just like in the test. So the skies were painted first, and when that dried he positioned the architecture roughly. You can see he also figured out where the light comes from in this phase, and also he gave some texture to the facade.
In the next layer he is starting to detail the buildings a bit further. I often put my own buildings in his sight so that he can copy the look and match the design of the painting to the rest of the film.
With each layer he is getting it more detailed. Also, you can see he applied a dark wash over the whole painting. That way it gets closer to the final atmosphere that we need, but the colors he painted earlier come through and make the painting richer. (At least that's what he tells me, haha. Those are techniques he uses on his regular paintings.)
Next, he added the blue highlights on the right sides of the buildings since we imagine the rest of the city is on the right.
There's still some more layers and detailing to do, but this is where we're at right now.
In the meantime when I wasn't watching Stipan paint (which is very relaxing) I built a couple of small but pretty detailed towers with blinking lights. We'll try and use them as a foreground for the Matte painting to give it some dimensionality, but we can use them when we film the miniatures as well.
And a bit of paint and weathering:
In other news our old friend Citroen BX arrived to the studio again!!!
As I noted before, the one we filmed in couple of years ago is probably crushed, so we had to find the same model again for the pickups we want to film. It turned out the model with that beautiful interior we need is almost impossible to find, so we spent a lot of time and even searched for them in the neighbour countries. We finally managed to find one, and now it's sitting in my yard.
We did have some fun with it though, hahaha :lol
Cheers!