G&G Fan, can you give a clip of the matte painting being used in the movie?
That was just an initial test on a pic of I found to see if I could accomplish making a CGI image look like a matte painting.
So I started working on an actual scene. I decided to continue with Padme’s Ruminations. These are the first two shots.
The clip is regraded, as will be my version of the entire movie.
First thing I did was stabilize the shots. A user on thestarwarstrilogy.com pointed out to me that the OT shots are mostly stable, so removing the digital zooms brings it closer to that classic feel, whilst also making this more convenient. Then I took a snapshot of the shot within Premiere.
I imported the image into Photoshop, selected the backgrounds and used the Oil Paint filter, tuning it to my liking. I used Generative Fill to remove all of the traffic cars, not only because they don’t work as a painting and I don’t want to painfully rotoscope them. I also find them irritating: it makes the shots too noisy and distracting.
Then I exported those elements separately from the rest of the shot as a transparent pngs and placed them on top of the video, adding grain in Premiere so that they weren’t just flat still images.
The next and more difficult step will be figuring out how to do this process when there’s a character standing in the matte. I can’t just slap the image on like I can these shots.