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Alan Moore is a funny chap. He is an internationally acclaimed writer, responsible for hundreds are culturally impactful works including V for Vendetta, Watchmen, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Swamp Thing and so much more.
He is one of the few people out there who is who he say's he is. His political and social political conscience possesses him whenever he lifts his pen to write and, during this artistic collaboration, I had the very rare privilege of spending time with this genuinely incredible person.
After working on a few articles on his underground magazine 'Dodgem Logic', myself and a few of my closest collaborators, Gavin & Alix Wallace, were asked to work closely with him on a short story he was to write. The plan was that we would deliver him an image and he would write a portion of the story. Then we would produce a second image and he would respond with another stage of his story. In the end, we simplified the process - he wrote the story in its entirety and we simply illustrated it. This became necessary because the first image I produced was 'far too violent' for Alan. I thought is was more comedy than gore but upon reflection, I can see his point. This image was later requested by the Repurposed Theatre in San Francisco.
This Place is the Place
The Possibility of Life on Another World was a wonderful project for us and jump started the artistic direction that we are now on. We won ‘best digital art’ at the LICC Awards for our work on this project. This image was carefully constructed from a number of photographic sources before we added layer upon layer of matt painting to degrade and age the surrounding territory.
These images were created to accompany a short story written by world famous writer Alan Moore for his Underground magazine Dodgem Logic.
The Place is the Place Pre-Comp
Hiding From No-one
This image had the least amount of digital matte painting but the colour grading was extensive as we had to transform the scene from the daylight it shot in, to the night time the story called for. The painting was almost entirely a re-lighting procedure.
Hiding From No-one Pre-Comp
House on the Hill
Of all of the images that we contributed to Alan's story, this is the piece I'm most proud of. If you place the original photograph of the house next to the final comp, you get a sense of how much detail work went into the final image.
There are so many techniques that went into this but one I remember feeling quite excited by was the technique I employed to add the climbing ivy on the front of the brick work. I took a few photographs of ivy leaves outside the wall in front of Alan Moores home in Northampton, masked them out and built a few photoshop brushes out of those photos. I used these brushes to literally paint on the plant to the outside of the house in this shot.
House on the Hill original photograph
Departure
Arrival