Digital Content Producer has a step-by-step on the recreation of the Kennedy Assassination scene in Watchment, and how they added the extra elements of Zapruder filming and the Comedian.

CIS Hollywood used a combination of 3D CG elements and 2D matte painting projections to re-create Dealey Plaza. Hirota’s team used Adobe Photoshop for matte painting and Autodesk Maya to build 3D elements and to do the matte painting projections. “We built 3D geometry where necessary and we rendered it in [Pixar] RenderMan,” Hirota says. “Because the camera was moving so much, we’d then take an image and project it back onto the geometry that we’d built and see how it all worked. When we had it in 3-space, sometimes we’d have to clean up the painting projected on the 3D models to make sure that there was no stretching. The moving camera is why we couldn’t just track in a 2D matte painting. The camera is both moving in 3D space and it’s panning around. The camera travels down the road as well, so the environment had to be 3D.”

via Step by Step: Watchmen.

Tags