During the post-production phase of "The Brothers Chance" movie, we quickly realized that in our haste to shoot the gunfight scenes (we only had about 8 hours to shoot the scenes), we forgot to get a shot of the town at sunset with our hero walking into an alleyway between the buildings. Due to various factors, we were not able to shoot the scene at the original location, therefore we decided upon using a matte painting. Here were the steps taken.

Step 1: First, we shot some video of our hero walking in the "town". The "town" in this case is an empty parking lot. To the right, the grass line by the small shed served as a perspective line for the street. Since we did not have a perspective line for the left, we strung a clothesline between two ladders. The scene was filmed from the third story window of a building adjacent to the parking lot.

Step 2: Once completed, we captured the first and last video frames. From the video frames, a pencil sketch was developed of the town. To maintain the illusion that that town was real and the actors were part of the scene, it was vital to provide as much detail as possible and to include the proper perspective lines within the sketch.

Step 3: The sketch is taped to a the back of a piece of glass. The town is painted by our artist using acrylics. Some of the paint in the highlight areas is thinned such that light can pass through from the back of the glass.

Step 4: The matte painting is captured on video and matched to the original scene. Edges are feathered as not to cause an abrupt transition between the matte and the live action. The digital sunset was added in the special edition version to mask some of the digital artifacts which occurred when the scenes were blended.