Painted or digitally crafted background extension — saves set construction and location shoots. Combined in studio against green screen, analog or digital.
In classic studio production, the matte painting was the tool of choice for expanding architecture, landscapes, or urban scenarios — without stepping foot outside. The matte painter sat in the studio and painted on glass or later on celluloid, while the actor stood in front of a silhouette or a key-light setup. The exposed plate was then optically combined with the live-action material — in trick cinematography, using counter-exposures and masks. Not elegant, but functional.
Today, the work is done digitally, but it hasn't lost its essence. A matte painter sits in Nuke or a similar compositing suite and constructs the background: building facades, skies, distant mountain ranges, destroyed city districts. The source can be photographic material — textures that come from the set or from a library — or pure hand-painting with brush plugins. What's crucial is that the plate must absolutely harmonize with the camera movement and the perspective grid of the live-action footage. Incorrect vanishing points are immediately noticeable. That's why one works with geometry, with depth models, and position tracking, no longer with pure 2D painting.
The practical workflow: You have a greenscreen shot of the talent against a neutral background. The keyer isolates the character. In parallel, the VFX artist develops the matte painting — painting, texturing, rendering, or combining photo material until it sits photorealistically. Lighting, color temperature, and shadow direction must be coordinated with the key light on set. Then, both layers are placed into the final composition: talent in front, plate behind. A good matte painting requires blur adjustments and possibly noise correction so that the illusion doesn't break.
Large productions use matte paintings not as a cost-saving measure, but as a design tool. A scene is shot in a studio setting that shows only a fraction of the planned environment, and it's expanded painterly. This gives the director control over details that would be chaos in a real location. Another advantage: changes happen quickly. The director wants different clouds? The painter changes them in the morning. This would be impossible in a real location.