Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

(2004) This film was a huge challenge for all of us at Stan Winston Digital. There were many types of effects shots for us to achieve, some were 3D animated creatures but we also had a ton of 3D digital matte paintings for the backgrounds. I was assigned to create these matte paintings along with artist Kino Scialabba. Together we tackled the immense task of creating all the jungle vegetation backgrounds and shared a great deal of the same reference images to composite into our respective scenes which allowed us to keep everything looking cohesive and from the same jungle. Each of the Photoshop paintings we submitted for composite were separated into at least 20 layers to enable them to be projected onto 3D models for camera moves... kind of like in a pop-up book. Some of the final shots in the movie even use collected elements originally made for separate paintings.

The cliff with tree bridge scene backgrounds were mostly my duties. Below are the ones I created almost entirely, aside from the very distant tree clusters across the ravine, which were done by Kino. These first seven paintings were a massive amount of work in Photoshop and together Kino and I we were able to find real photo references of all the elements, including the rocky cliffs. Many elements were also digitally painted from scratch in Photoshop. .

The two painting below were by far the most difficult task for me because I had to figure out how to match the cliffs from the other shots but this time in aerial views. Not only could I not find ANY good photos of real cliffs from above on the internet, but back in 2003 while working on this, the software I might use today to create awesome 3D digital cliffs were in their infancy and were not sufficient so instead I used good old fashioned techniques to get what I wanted... I sculpted the cliffs in clay, took photos and Photoshopped the heck out of the rest!

I didn't have time to sculpt both sides of the cliff walls and I knew that if I shot the images from different angles and lit them from opposite sides, I could get away with creating just one cliff and no one would ever be able to tell. Below are a couple of the original photos and then the final paintings after that.

Below is the scene from the film that encompasses all of these paintings.

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