Making The Visit - Backgrounds

Now begins a very difficult part of the moviemaking: creating the backgrounds. By this, I really mean a great deal more than simply making the backgrounds. I will draw lots of pictures until I hit upon a style that I feel suits the story I want to tell. This is not going to be easy. I have already started sketching and have not found anything yet. I am trying pencil, pen, and a digital paint program called ArtRage. I like its simplicity and the way it reproduces pencils, crayons, markers, oil paints and pallet knives. I also like the fact that it only cost me $20. The picture above shows that I have decided on a widescreen format for the movie. This is called a 16 : 9 ratio. It will measure 800 by 450 pixels. The background you see here is not anywhere near what I will actually use. It is just my way of testing the ArtRage painting program. I exported an image from the program and then imported that image into Flash 8 to place it on a layer behind the layer with Oksana. I then placed a light fog on a layer in front of Oksana's feet. So, this is my first attempt at a background for The Visit. Thus begins a process that will really decide exactly what kind of movie I am going to make.

Here is a picture of the ArtRage user interface as I worked on my test background image:



And below is a picture of the 3 layers in Flash. Once they were all set, I exported the widescreen image you saw above.