Excellent article. And a great opportunity to share one of my favorite scifi worldbuilding artifacts: the 4K matte painting used for the brief view of Manhattan during the take-off sequence:
http://web.archive.org/web/20161007133354if_/http://digitald...
The overall vision for the city is implicit but wildly creative: sea levels have dropped significantly, with the architecture of the city spreading across the newly-exposed land and leaving original structures like the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan's skyscrapers, and the Statue of Liberty towering above the landscape. There are also oodles of tiny details scattered throughout the image -- you can pore over it for a good 10 minutes and still find more to appreciate. Very cool of Digital Domain to share it originally.
This scene takes place so fast, and my attention is always on the departing ship, that I never noticed the fine background details. Thanks a bunch for posting this great image!
One of the photog friends I have works on shooting panos of city sky lines that are used for the modern version of the matte paintings used to fill the windows in studio shoots. It's impressive to see them in person.
I took the extended WB back lot tour years ago, and part of the tour was through the matte painting shop. The scale is very impressive. To see artists on 12' ladders to work on it was a nice "human for scale" during the tour.
The circular/sphere real time screen backgrounds Favro at Disney/StarWars is using for The Mandolorian is also neat tech as well.
This is amazing and absolutely brilliantly detailed for what, a 2 second shot? Thank you for sharing.
Went to add this to my rotation wallpaper collection, only to realize it's already there.