"Beyond the great voice acting and storytelling, one clear feature stood out: the stunning visual effects, which were achieved not by the latest advanced technology of power rigs and cinematic-like sequencing but by the use of matte painting."
"Frame by frame, whether the brush strokes were on the characters or as the background of the cityscape, viewers experienced a curated display of the gritty, noir and grungy textures of a world fitting for the character, giving a nostalgic styling back to the 70s and 90s."
""It was a complete retraining of our team to think more in the natural medium and less in the digital medium," says Joel Aron, Director of Cinematography Lighting & VFX at Lucasfilm Animation. "That allows us a lot of freedom to kind of update matte paintings or push things farther in certain areas, as long as we're not upstaging the story.""
"And Lucasfilm isn't the only team that traded the smooth plastic-like appearance of a 3D environment for something more natural. We can see the influence of the modern hybrid styles of the likes of Arcane, Goat and the Spider-Verse movies in the blend of CG animation with more painterly, hand-crafted textures, each receiving its own accolades."
Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord delivers strong animated storytelling and voice work alongside visual effects created through matte painting rather than advanced high-tech rigs. Frame-by-frame brushwork appears on characters and in cityscape backgrounds, producing curated gritty, noir, and grungy textures. The resulting look provides nostalgic styling associated with earlier decades while supporting the character’s world. The production retrained the team to think in natural medium instead of digital medium, enabling updates to matte paintings and pushing details further while avoiding distraction from the story. Similar hybrid approaches appear in other acclaimed works that combine CG animation with painterly, hand-crafted textures.
Read at Medium
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]