digital matte painter and environment artist
Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) Method Studios Vancouver
We were the first (and last) environments team Method Vancouver had and it was an extremely memorable one (in a good way!). During the spring of 2021 I joined the team for the show and at first it was mainly myself and our wonderful lead assembling the entire Omnipotent City by ourselves in Maya. One of the challenges of being a new department is that there aren't a lot of tools to make our lives easier. So as you would expect our scene files for this city became quite a slog as we were not using Houdini at the time(or anything else that would make our lives easier).
Each kind of "tower" within the city was it's own unique self with smaller towers within it along with plenty of set dressing (bridges, statues, trees, walkways, shrubs, and platforms). We went though many iterations for the layout of each of these towers to make sure they were unique and eventually we had created an extensive library. The city was eventually split into many quadrants so we could create "manageable" variant layouts for different shots.
There are so many more aspects about this city that I could ramble about. This was by far my favorite show and team to work with, we had an incredible CG supervisor along with an amazing team of artists that I will never forget.
Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters (2023) Framestore Vancouver
The Matte Painting for this show was quite extensive. There are two notable environments for the snowy scenes and that is day and night, both the same set of mountains, similar sky and ground. My tasks were mostly for the daytime shots and what we did was assembly one giant 360 daytime DMP (it had a night time counterpart as well) that would encompass all shots at various points in our projection setup.
The most challenging part of this matte painting was assembling all of the set reference into one cohesive image. A lot of them were at different times of day, were of various quality and had set vehicles and people scattered all over them. Most skies had their own variant iterations per shot as well.
Finally, the last image (and most interesting I think) is the deceased pilot. The actor only had a bit of white, faint face paint on him and they wanted him to look completely and hopelessly frosted over. I had to repaint over his entire face, hair, clothes and the damaged wing he's laying on to reflect this and then create a proper projection set up to work with the shot.
Wonka (2023) Framestore Vancouver
For this show I was tasked with quite a chunk of Matte Painting work, mostly recreating the entirety of the giraffe enclosure from the on set client references (ceiling, walls, windows, ground). These scenes had eccentric camera movements so I had to create projection setups that were appropriate.
The Falcon And The Winter Soldier (2021) Sony Imageworks
I jumped onto this show about halfway through, so part of the challenge for me was getting up to speed as quickly as possible with the team. There was a master set up that encompassed large portions of the recreated New York City for different sequences. A lot of shots were very street/location specific within the master setup so it was important to paint and project the correct buildings for continuity.
Rampage (2018) Hydraulx
An oldie but still a goodie. This was quite a large matte painting I did much earlier in my career. There was only a small patch of real ground plate around the center of the shot and the rest had to be extended quite extensively to cover the large camera movement.
Shadow (2018) Darkhorse 10 Pictures Inc
My first job ever in 2017. I'm always compelled to add these every time I update my showreel. They are a great reminder of where I started and I still enjoy looking at them. These two shots were set extensions and background matte paintings. Half of the town the rider is going through did not exist and I had the task to extend them.
Personal Project (2020)
A personal project of mine from a few years ago. Modelled in Maya, textured in Substance Painter and rendered with Arnold. I found a reference I thought would be a bit of a challenge for me to recreate considering all of the reflective surfaced and materials you would see in a bathroom. I took a few creative liberties with some of the details. But I had a lot of fun with this and I'm still proud of it.
See reference image below:
