Page 30 - Star Wars Insider (Special Edition 2020)

MATTE PAINTINGS
even painted a matte, working
under the guidance of supervisors
Chris Evans and Craig Barron.
“There was a little bit more
room for experimentation. And
Chris and Craig really liked to keep
their hands on the whole process,
so they loved the original negative
method. They loved being able to
shoot the plate, do the painting,
do the exposure of the painting,
and then deliver a final shot.”
Digital Inroads
Huston would go on to hone his
skills as a matte painter on features
such as The Goonies (1985), and
Ghostbusters II (1989), and by
the early 1990s he was very well
established in ILM’s matte painting
department. He recalls that, as the
decade progressed, “Photoshop
came along, and I immediately
‘glommed’ onto it.”
The first digital matte work he
undertook with Photoshop was
for commercials, but it wasn’t
long before he was applying the
technique on narrative work—
specifically The Young Indiana
Jones Chronicles (1992-93).
“Bruce Walters was the head of
the matte department, and he set
[matte painter] Yusei Uesugi and
myself up in a small back room
in D Building [at ILM’s San Rafael
facility] to see what we could do
with some Young Indy shots.
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“As Photoshop’s tools got
more sophisticated, it got easier
and easier to use,” he continues.
“When we first started using it,
there were no layers. You could
cut and paste, and there was
this crawly ant line around the
selection you made. If you clicked
on it, it would just immediately
composite. You’d end up doing
things over and over again until
you got it at just the right angle.
Yusei would use photo reference
and do small acrylic paintings.
Then he would photograph
his painting and take that into
Photoshop at the end to avoid the
cut-and-paste level entirely. I was
08
more comfortable just hammering
everything in Photoshop.”
Complementing the tools
in Photoshop, Huston, Uesugi
and their colleagues also began
working with After Effects for 2D
animated elements, as well as
the 3D programs Electric Image
and Form-Z. Huston notes: “We
jumped into 3D right away
because there are so many things
that you used to have to do
manually as a matte artist that 3D
just does—like perspective grids,
which are tedious but need a high
degree of accuracy. A lot of things
became much easier.”
Huston also continued to
draw on his prior experience with
miniatures and model making. “I
would go buy a toy car or a toy
truck, or I could quickly build
something in foam core and paint
it,” he explains. He would then
take photos of the miniatures that
he could scan and work with in
the computer. “Or you’d head
to the bookstore to see if you
could get a book that had a good
photograph that you could scan
and then manipulate digitally.”
Taking what they’d learned
on Young Indy, Huston and
Uesugi then applied their digital
matte techniques to the Star Wars
Special Editions (1997). Uesugi
built the Mos Eisley spaceport
as a 3D computer-generated
(CG) environment, enabling
camera movement with realistic
parallax as Luke’s landspeeder
makes its way through the streets
before stopping at the Imperial
checkpoint. Huston, meanwhile,
composed digital mattes of Mos
Eisley, basing his work off photos
of miniatures he constructed from
foam core, paint cans, plastic
balls, and other materials. He
also worked with miniatures for a
new establishing shot of Obi-Wan
Kenobi’s desert home, with Luke’s
landspeeder parked outside.
Working with visual effects
supervisor John Knoll, Huston
also built a six-foot-wide model