Past Work: Matte Painting for Fifth Element

I worked at Digital Domain from 1995-1997. This is a screen grab from Fifth Element, I was working in thier new media dept doing concept art for game ideas and they needed help doing a 3d creature transformation. One of the producers remembered I had some experience sculpting monsters ect and asked if I could help with a shot where a guy turns into a creature in front of Gary Oldman. Was working with Mark Stetson a great supervisor and gave me the chance to try matte painting. This image is a screen grab from the movie,

The upper part is a miniture it needed realism painted back into it ,as well as some set extension work. For the lower areas of NY I built that in Alias and lit it, took a render and comped that back over the original plate in photoshop. If I was to do this shot today would just paint the entire thing, It was a great experience and thank Mark for letting a young artist at the time try something new.

The image above was a creature transformation that takes place in front of Gary Oldman...I wish we had the tools that are available now for this I put a lot of time in on this shot. I used Alias and photoshop...I also used amazon 3d paint to line up where the features were on the texture it was a back and forth workflow between photoshop and alias that taught me a lot about patience.