Blade Runner SUSHI BAR + SLICE OF LIFE making of

Supporting your project is money well spent. You prove it with every post.

Awesome, and thank you for letting us have a glimpse onto these techniques.

Thorsten
 
@StevenBills For now we only have our homemade crappy slider, but we'll get a better one soon. And, yeah, we'll definitely add a camera move to the painting, probably even put some miniature antennas or towers in the foreground to get that parallax! This is so excitiiiing, haha!!! :D

I guess you could just do it in AE using different layers in 3D space, but that doesn't really jive with all your old-skool production techniques :cool

SB
 
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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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And a bit of paint and weathering:

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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.

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We did have some fun with it though, hahaha :lol

Cheers!
 
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Oh, that brings back some memories… :)

Do you still have the insert piece or will you have to recreate it?

Those matte's are looking very cool too. They are showing an even more expansive landscape, excellent!

R
 
Yeah, it's really cool to see the painting come to life. And using plexiglass instead of glass is a smart move to cut down on the chances of accidental smashy-smashy! Come to think of it, it makes me wonder why old school matte painters didn't use plexi.
 
@Dem Bones: Yeah, I looked all over the internet and through my SFX books to find the info about the actual surface they painted on. It says "glass" everywhere, but could it be that's just the general term for the transparent surface, and in some instances they used plexiglass or something similar? For example I watched this (amazing) short doc, and when that guy carries the panel around (23m4sec), it looks pretty light to me. Glass surface that big could never be that light, right? Especially if you want it to be safe you have to go thicker than 5-6mm, and that would be HEAVY!


Also @rubble, we saved all consoles from the inside of the car, no worries. ;)
 
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Most often 1/8" (3mm) glass was used. Plexiglas wasn't used for several reasons. First, it's not all that stable under the hot lights used on the matte painting stands. Second, it's prone to scratching. Something that was often done was to scrape the paint of the glass to create clear windows either for compositing or lighting effects. Third, plexiglas can react to solvent paints. Yes, they were fragile.

I know we used already framed tempered glass shower doors on occasion. Ready to go and the tempered glass made them stronger and safer.

Actually, if there wasn't the need to have the clear areas we'd just go with Masonite panels. Cheap, smooth and unbreakable.
 
LukaFilm, great video link. I'm always amazed by how loose the brushwork is when you see these things up close and yet, on screen, everything blends together so convincingly.

DaveG, that's very interesting. Thanks for the additional information!
 
BRAVO! Those matte paintings are works of art. Just brilliant! You guys/gals are knocking this out of the ballpark!

Whatever you guys do... PLEASE hang on to all those models and paintings! :)
 
DaveG, wooow, thanks a lot man! That's some great and very logical info! Did you do some painting yourself? I followed your awesome snub nosed blasters production some time ago! Wonderful job!

Thank you all for liking our work too! :)
 
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No, I wasn't a matte painter, I was a model shop supervisor and visual effects supervisor. When I say "we" I mean the VFX house(s) I worked at. A lot was at Dream Quest Images. Bob Scifo and Rocco Giofre were the two main matte painters at DQ. I always loved watching them work. And thanks for the kudos on the Snubby.

The work your team is doing on your short is wonderful! Great to see.
 
DaveG Oh coooool. Sure, I know of Dream Quest.. Read a lot about them in Cinefex. Rocco Giofre painted some Blade runner mattes under Matthew Yuricich, so I've seen his work. Must have been awesome to be a part of all that. Thanks again for the info and on your kind words! ;)
 
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Yo guys!

So it's been very busy at Slice headquarters these days... We were preparing for the filming of the new scenes, and some pickups to make the flow of the film better.
So there was tons of props to make, build sets, decorate the car again... these things were my job because I like to build things. At the same time Dino was editing the tests we filmed and trying to figure out the schedule for the filming.

Here's the new Production Diary that explains these stuff in more details:


And now, here's the amazing conclusion of the story of the creation of the first matte painting!

Stipan finished detailing the painting and painted some neon signs on the buildings. For the front building we wanted some huge neon letters and we decided to write ADLER which is how we named our hero flying car.

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Then we decided we hated it, and invented some random company called ALco. And we made the sign much smaller.

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You can see the lights are already turned on. We back lit the painting and Stipan scratched each one with the exacto knife. We painted the neon lights with color markers.

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And here's a quick test how it all looks in the end right now:

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It's really good to do these tests as I can then give feedback to Stipan what to fix or which highlights to make stronger.

Ok, so we started filming now, and we plan to finish the live action part in 8 days. I'll make another Diary about it, and then we start preparing the miniature shoot!

See you soon guys!
 

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