People Behind the Scenes: Interview with Matte Painter Chandrakant Shenoy : Bollywood News

The first film that comes to mind is Rock On; this film had good scope of matte paintings. We made Farhan Akhtars house seem like its on the 18th floor with the skyline, with good lightning, but the scene was shot on chroma. Our VFX supervisor Prasad and I with the production team went and shot images of day, evening and night from different buildings around Bombay. We shot the images with a DSLR camera and then tweaked these images in our labs to enhance the look and feel of the scene. In All The Best, there were significant amounts of work involved. For some backgrounds for the film we have gone and changed them physically instead of replacing chroma backgrounds. In short, we have changed entire locations of the sets in the film. I would highlight the blast sequence in Raajneeti, to fabricate this scene possible we made storyboards which helped us with the amount of layers that were involved. There were mainly four layers which consisted of the actors, the explosion, the same cars were used and the fire plates which were enhanced. This was all VFX supervisors genius behind the execution of the scene. For OUATIM, every shot in the film was vfx heavy, almost all the shots required matte paintings. The Parda song sequence in the film was shot on chroma floors, the challenge was to portray that the shot was taking place in the night at marine drive. After we got permission we took pictures as references of marine drive in the night as well. Then we recreated the whole scene in matte paintings in the background and CGI elements were added as well.

When it comes to matte painting, how are projects handled in Pixion?

Normally when a project comes forth, we sit for dailies with our seniors and leads and watch whatever offline content we get from the clients. With these meetings we understand what shots require matte paintings, and those particular shots are discussed in depth. Occasionally, the deadlines are quite pressing where-in we are required to finish matte paints on the same day. At times artists are required to stay back and work on pending projects. We work around the clock.