The beginning of Project Brief 4 has been quite shaky. At the beginning of semester I wrote that I was fascinated by the idea of exploring matte paintings, knowing full well that that was next to impossible as the technique is basically never used anymore. The immediate question became what aspect of matte paintings can I use, how can I use them to inform my process in creating something that works.

In our studio class for Week 10 Dan linked me to a blog tribute to Golden Age Hollywood effects called NZ Pete’s Matte Shot (mouthful). I was extremely impressed by the fact that Dan knew of this obscure blog’s existence but also by the content on the page itself.

Many of the shots detailed on the blog were impressive but the one which stood out to me and the one which triggered my idea for my project was the shot with the incredibly large moon. It was actually sort of a call back to an image I had seen in conjunction with a song I studies in high school called Sleep by classical composer Dominick Argento. The song is for classical voice but my idea was to remove the vocal track and attempt to narrate the lyrics with visuals.

Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night,
Brother to Death, in silent darkness born,
Relieve my [languish]1 and restore [the]2 light,
With dark forgetting of my cares, return;
And let the day be time enough to mourn
The shipwreck of my ill-adventur'd youth:
Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn,
Without the torment of the night's untruth.
Cease, dreams, th' [imagery of our]3 day-desires
To model forth the passions of the morrow;
Never let rising sun approve you liars,
To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow.
Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain;
And never wake to feel the day's disdain.

My concept is to build the song out of lyrical pieces with certain beats having certain actions associated with them. One of the hardest things about actually shooting this will be finding a space that makes sense to shoot it and how on earth to pull off the technical challenges of having a character fly with only one-two weeks to actually shoot the film.

For the mattes. I wanted to use still shots predominantly and use Visual Effects and digital painting to create the final shots. As the Old’s Cool course is designed to explore the dichotomy of New Media from Old media techniques. I thought it might be worth exploring new media techniques that incorporate the ideas of old media like digital paint process. I am unsure yet how to achieve this but I would love for the stars scene and the moon climbing scene to use actually painted mattes.

The next step is realising the human matte. My main character Dominick has several scenes that need to take place whereby the lighting changes very quickly and then the silhouette creates a screen matte for the background. This is very simple in the computer (much simpler than the film days though the concept of screening is again, much like painting, the same.) This is something I can explore in my final reflection, the idea that techniques may change medium or the process become simplified but we never really invent new concepts we just morph them into new ones.