Gatekeeper

4faher · **Gatekeeper -** February 5th, 2010, 06:44 PM

Hi Guys!

Man, there's a lot of wonderful work displayed in this forum. I feel like a lamb tip toeing into a pack of sleeping wolves.

I'm a graphic designer for the most part, but leaning more and more on my interest for concept arts and matte painting. This is the very beginning (I've got far to go) of a matte - created for the Sci-Fi movie "Gatekeeper" with crew and cast from Star Trek and Star Wars.

It's to be the UFP Headquarters on Mars, and naturally quite a few of the details will be animated in CGI - like ships, people, water, fog, fire, lights and so on. But it's always nice to put it in anyways to get an idea of what the final shot will look like. At this point everything is quite simple and a few details not yet in righ perspective. The angle is also somewhat dull, but the script demanded it this way as the action is to play the leading part in the 4 sec. this setting is seen.

Any comments so far?

PS! You may join the production if you have done concepts/mattes/cgi for a while. Gatekeeper is the worlds biggest MTC (Multi Talent Co-operation) - which is an advanced form of fan production. There are 48 countries involved and it's a great way to get started without being used by independent producers selling the film and taking all the money for themselves. I'll post more info if the web masters here alows it. I'll ask them first if it's ok!

4faher · 05:08 AM

It's always interesting to see how things are made. Hers some details of my process for at least part of the matte:

shape, shaddow/colour, texture, lighting/atmosphere/details

4faher · **Terra Forming -** February 6th, 2010, 04:56 AM

To create planets for the movie I have developed my own technique for estimating exactly what the planet will look like. Here's our neighbor Mars and a high resolution photo taken by NASA.

As you all know the darker parts usually show the lower areas and the lighter ones the highest areas - so when removing all areas that are darker than a certain shade (the lighter the shade the more water you get) you get the part you'll be using for sea.

Then you hand paint details in the sea to demonstrate the depth of the water, and start hand painting in dry areas and vegetation on land. And as you know you'll find the dry areas around equator. And finally you either use it as a texture for an sphere, to create an entire planet, or you add clouds (as I've done in this case) to create a shot of the ground seen from a ship or space station.