Christopher_Evans

its nice to forget the agony and only remember the ecstasy when possible, but let me try. Believe it or not we didn't have to make too many changes because we had an awesome art department and worked with decisive directors most of the time. However there was a killer shot on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It was an establishing shot of the Temple full screen, a total painting with no live action. Crazy - they had too much faith in our abilities! It was front lit with a full moon rising over the temple. Pangrazio told me to do the shot. After a few weeks it wasn't looking very real. So Mike took it over and did his best, which probably actually was the best any artist could have done. But still not looking real. So Mike totally changed the concept of how to do the shot. Made the temple a dark silhouette against a sunset, filmed using a cut out against a real sky. It was brilliantly simple and worked great! As far as biggest rescue I'd say it was doing a painting looking up into the Never Tree to replace a $200,000 miniature set that never had depth or scale regardless of how much detail or smoke was added.

used to be good. comparable to a good carpenter or plumber. These days a lot of work is going overseas to sweat shops paying very low wages.

Our work at Matte World Digital for David Fincher's film Zodiac went almost unnoticed. Twenty five shots I believe and very difficult establishing shots of San Francisco in the 70s. But for matte shots to simply be believed and accepted by the audience and not noticed as fake is a sign of their success, so something to be proud of. There are a few shots in Star Trek films that I wish looked better to me now, but they were appropriate to the style of that time.

I'm currently working on a huge mural for the Chumash Indian tribe of California for their cultural heritage museum. Not painted any matte paintings in a while . The last was for Hugo. Most challenging was probably Willow, but very rewarding. Most frustrating - The Road. Matte Paintings can add tremendous visual scope to a movie, and yet are often misunderstood, and used as an afterthought rather than as an integral part of the cinematic storytelling. Digital painting, CG environments and Photoshop have not solved all the problems of making complex illusion of reality so I still see shots that don't look real. The job requires a study of nature, a knowledge of photographic lighting, artistic skill, and a gift for being able to see and imitate what looks real.

The average ILM matte painting took between one to two weeks depending on difficulty. The painting in the Reddit album showing the Death Star trench and docking bay took one month.August 1983. That photo of me using a magnifying glass to do detail was actually hamming it up. There was lots of detail, but nothing microscopic.