you may have seen videos going around

that show what famous movies

would look like if they were framed for our phones.

They're kind of sick!

And they all seem to have been released

right after the debut of Photoshops

new ‘generative fill’ tool.

As the name implies,

the tool allows you to generate imagery

with a simple text prompt.

And these videos, they're using this tool

as a really technologically advanced filmmaking technique,

one that's been used for over 100 years...

Albeit, with a totally different skill set.

So will A.I. be the next evolution of the matte painting?

when it comes to traditional matte paintings,

You might think of something like this from The Wizard of Oz.

Dorothy and friends are real,

but the Emerald City isn't really there.

It's just an illustration.

Using this technique,

filmmakers were able to make an impossible world

look real, at a much cheaper price tag

than building a full set.

This one was made with crayons,

but usually matte paintings are painted on glass,

like in Mary Poppins...

...or Star Wars,

which is maybe the best example, because, you know,

everybody like Star W-

I was never a Star Wars fan, which is hard to admit for me.

It was Alien, Blade Runner,

when The Matrix came out was th like... my final like, what is that?

I want to do that for a living.

I'm Maxx Berman, I spent over a decade working

as a matte painter in film and games

and I'm the co-founder of Kitbash3D.

Maxx is here to help me explain how matte paintings

went from oil paint on glass... to this.

in terms of the transition from traditional to digital,

there's a couple of chapters of this,

the first one is Photoshop.

We can paint in layers

and layers changes everything for us.

We can go backwards and forwards.

We can be working on the background

and the foreground separately, and having every brush

imaginable, and every color imaginable.

Now, this is the first digital matte painting.

And it still feels like a painting because it kind of was

The tools were different, but

we brought a painting technique to that digital.

Then we kind of moved into

what's called photo bashing.

I did a film called Her,

I was responsible for doing all the matte paintings of future L.A.

I had backpacked through Southeast Asia

for about six weeks with a camera, so I would be pulling

from all of those photographs from my travels to say,

what if we used, kind of, Bangkok a starting point?

And then we modified the architecture

to look more like the L.A.?

So did traditional matte painters see photo

bashing as a sort of cheat?

Like, whoa, you don't have to paint anything anymore?

That's not fair.

some of the other

more senior matte painters would be like,

“What the hell are you doing over there?”

Every era of a technology change,

it's looked at as cheating until it becomes commonplace.

We'll hear more about the

next big step forward in matte painting

after a message from this video’s sponsor.

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Now back to our video.

The next big step forward for matte painting

was to push those 2D layers into 3D space.

which Maxx did on Iron Man 3,

using the compositing program Nuke.

For those shots,

I painted a bunch of clouds and they were all on layers

and then I painted the landscape and the sky behind it.

All of that was set up as a projection

so that as we moved the camera with Iron Man back,

you could see the clouds moving, and him

getting further and further away from the shoreline.

Yeah, I actually found this example really interesting

because Iron Man is already being made in 3D,

so why not just make the whole shot 3D?

It is way cheaper and easier

and and more achievable to paint a photorealistic cloud

than it is to do a 3D simulation of a realistic cloud,

at least in that time.

So for a lot of those more expansive establishing

shots, bringing in a matte painter

could circumvent a lot of that.

But 3D tools caught up.

it is just as fast, if not faster today

to actually create

that environment in 3D than it would be in 2D.

Maxx's company actually helps

speed the process up in some ways.

Their pre-built assets are meant

to be dragged and dropped, helping

artists quickly build worlds

like you can see in this teaser for their Manhattan kit.

If you're using our Manhattan kit,

you're using the same exact thing that

Doctor Strange is using on their films.

Technology's getting a lot better these days.

Rendering and computing is cheaper than ever.

And because of that, you know, the need for a 2D artist

is becoming less and less valuable.

But what about a 2D artist

that can make a matte in seconds?

Now, I am not skilled enough to have ever pulled

anything like this off on my own.

But even artists who do have those skills

might one day have to start adding A.I.

to their toolbox.

I think it's just early days in this tool

we have some more work to do.

as someone who's learned how to communicate via

visuals composition, lighting, color,

all of these are my ways of expression,

and these are not the things that today

A.I. is picking up working with

Tools like Nvidia's A.I.

Canvas could begin to bridge that gap, as it takes

simple brushstrokes and transforms them

into photorealistic images.

But obviously, these tools aren't the same as a paintbrush.

Digital or physical.

Because with this, what you see is exactly what you get.

With these tools,

there's a gap between

what you put in and what you get out of it,

Getting exactly what you want

ends up being an iterative process,

often involving dozens of prompts, plus

some paintbrush tinkering in Photoshop or another app.

So right now,

these tools are thriving with individual creators.

But in Hollywood...

I have not seen anyone or any production

utilize it in production

and I think there's a couple of reasons for it.

One, it's not there yet.

It's close and it's getting better real quick,

but it's not there today.

The other part of it is the legalities

of you know, who owns the work that's being generated,

who owns the data that it was trained on.

ultimately, it's going to change everything.

I think we can't deny that.

And ultimately,

human plus computer beats

human and beats computer.

It is the marriage of these two

in which technology's always shined.