Cavor Cottage...

i am working on preproduction and concept art for HG Wells First men in the moon. I am starting with Dr Cavors Cottage a research scientist and visionary.

Start image:

This is the starting image, shot as always as a panoramic, I have covered panoramics in a previous post. This image was then flipped. Compositionally it works as the eye reads across the screen. Then a list was drawn up of items that needed removing. TV antennaes and street signs. Part of the screenplay mentions a canal. This is how Dr Cavor recieves all the coal, pig iron and equipment via the canal system.

The reason I always use the panoramic system is a consequence of the digital cinema and new developments in HD. It is more useful to keep tonal and texture detail. The owner of the cottage has asked me to keep its location a secret.

The next image is the after, as you can see I have removed modernity and the road and introduced a canal as part of the screenplay. Sometimes you cannot control the time of day when you are shooting. However if you source a sun compass most photographic shops have them you can predict the best time for shooting. The absolute worst time for a shoot is between 12 and 1 in the afternoon. Golden hour is the suggested time, Sun up and sun down. However you have to work quick to get a panoramic as you will get light bands across the image.

Big tip, get reference footage of textures, colours, grass, brick work etc... I didnt and I ended up spending a long time on CGtextures.com getting the right textures.

The furnace in the rear ground was from stock footage from the IronBridge region near Wolverhampton.

The next image is part of the surgery of realigning the perspective, a thankless task at times. Normally I use a technique that Dylan Cole uses and that is to make three perspective grids in primary colours. Red, Green, and Blue on seperate layers x,y,z axis.

I mucked up the perspective on the furnace to the rear of the house, I had to go into sketchup to check the axis were correct I created a primitive and used that to check the dimensions. Boy was I way off.

For this project I wrote a program that worked in photoshop CS4 that is useful to matte painters and the above image shows it action.

It has all the tools on it to enable the matte painter to use his wacom tablet to quick click the job required without tricky keyboard shortcuts. Over 60 downloads from matte painters from around the world are now using this system. Some from big name companies, I am now working on V2 so if you have a suggestion just let me know.

And finally a little treat

A speed matte with the moon over the cottage it is a pivotal character in the screen play and I just wanted a concept showing this. I normally never share my speed paints. In the background is the furnace lit and ready for work.

I am at the end of this matte painting process however there is one last thing to do and that is a 3 second camera mapping exercise which will probably take a day.

Look forward to your comments

Rich