ENCANTO
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TYPE: ANIMATION |
COMPANY: WALT DISNEY ANIMATION STUDIOS |
YEAR: 2021 |
ROLE: MATTE PAINTING |
Disney’s Encanto was made during the pandemic shutdown, and thus I got to return to Disney Animation while working from my home office in Tennessee.
I approached the family breakfast sequence as a giant 20k pano painting that could accommodate nearly all of the shots in this sequence. In the below pano, you can see how a giant oversized pano could cover the background of many different shots, maintaining continuity and world space. Background mountain shapes were brought into Clarisse to get the tree coverage and variation, a base for atmospheric reference and overall lighting to match the key foreground lighting. Renders would be taken into photoshop for more artistic finessing, and clouds were all painted in photoshop.
In this set extension from the same sequence, you can see how the painted clouds and mist were incorporated between hero FG hills and sets.
In some cases, the set extension is small and out of focus, like the below left show beyond the casita. For those shots I rendered the existing sets and extended the backgrounds so the lighting team could focus entirely on the foreground and hero characters. In other shots I was creating a sky to convey the right mood and feeling setting the stage both for hope and the coming emotional storm.
This shot of the mountain cracking open is one I really enjoyed working on. The effects team had a lot of work on their plate, so I took on the mountain cracking open with a digital matte painting and compositing approach. I made sure to paint all the pieces I needed for the crack and added debris and dust.
Whenever possible, I would combine shots by creating a larger pano to save on redundant shot work.
I was fortunate enough to work on the sequence of Mirabel leaving the family. I started by rendering out as many pieces of the hero set as possible, and extending and painting over what I needed to extend the town and bring it to life.
These last 2 shots of Mirabel walking through the broken mountain are ones I inherited but I’m still very proud of. The talented Alex Garcia started these shots with a stunning 3d build early into production. As the shots progressed, we needed to make changes, but didn’t have access to the original files. Using the renders and accompanying AOV’s, I had to paint changes into the renders we loved, but it also had to be stereo and accommodate a changing camera move. I painted over the color and depth maps and used the depth map to displace my own custom geometry to rebuild the shot.
