Day for Night

[rrische]

Here's a day for night painting I did a couple years ago
for "The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle".

http://www.mattepainting.org/vb/picture.php?albumid=3&pictureid=301

[B. Kachel]

this is awsome. How long did this one take you. I have yet to do a day for night painting and was wondeing what the first step it is you do.

[rrische]

Thanks, Brandon. This took about a week or ten days. The first step
was to create alpha channels for the fences, posts, chain link and barbed
wire around the yard. That took forever and was very very tedious.
But it's really important to realize that doing a day for night is never
as simple as a single color/ levels correction. You're completely
changing the lighting around, and it's usually major reconstructive
surgery.

[iordanis21]

Amazing work!!!

[Aedilhum]

Looks great as always ;). I have not seen the movie but it looks like a lot of time both for you and for the roto artists trying to comp all those little guys in. One question, for the background city lights, did you paint that in or use a photo of a different city at night?
Thanks for posting,
Jared Simeth

[rrische]

The yard at night was deserted, so the only thing required was
to paint out the prisoners in the day plate. The city lights were
extracted from some photos I had. I pulled them out using a
matte generated from a copy of one of the alpha channels.
Then I laid in the lights over the buildings way off in the distance.
They're so far away that I didn't have to be super accurate.

[Aedilhum]

Thanks for the quick reply!
It's great for us aspiring mattepainters to hear how you professionals do things. I eagerly await your next post! ;)

Jared Simeth