harper's bazaar 2007/12 - fotgotten light

matte painting & 3d: Tomáš Müller; retouches & final touchup: Stanislav Petera; styling: Tereza Kytková; model: Kate Netolická (company models); make-up: Nicol Enevová;
hair: Marek Pátl; assistants: Jan Svoboda, Aleš Fremut; production: Marek Jaroš

canon 5D, hasselblad h2d/phase one 22mpx digital back, profoto strobes, 3ds max+zbrush, adobe photoshop

the concept

Along with Tomáš Müller (with whom I work on most of my projects that require extensive postproduction or matte painting) we agreed to create fashion story based on fairytales and fantasy stories we both liked. And as editor-in-chief of Czech edition of Harper's Bazaar liked the idea a lot we started to work on the actual story - about a girl travelling through magical forest in a quest for forgotten light which is leading her towards the ultimate goal of her journey

storyboard sketch

Right after we came up with concept for this story (and got it approved) we started with first sketches of storyboard - which is crucial for a story like this in order to know exact angles of view when shooting and also to make sure composition would work even for double-page photos in magazine

composition test

Created with already shot photo (altough not retouched) before starting with actual work in 3D software to see if scene composition works and to fine-tune it before making 3D-model

3d model

Rough model was created in 3D Studio Max, then finetuned/sculpted using ZBrush

some of the source photos

Photos (including final shot of the model, not yet retouched) that are to be used in final composition - we started to shoot these some time before the actual shoot with models, to make sure we had enough hi-res material to work with

rendered scene

Along with some tweaks of colours and contrast and with forest and sky already put-together with rendered material

rough composition

with model and some more tweaks of colours and contrast troughout the scene

final composition

Model is now in place, light and colors are modified in order for whole scene to be compact, mist added to create even more depth and mystery and to put all of the elements together

final image

Colors were further changed to work well together with rest of the story and there was some more hi-end postproduction to ensure final image would look sleek and sexy and voila - this is final image, most compex one in whole story, took 2 days of work on postproduction - one for Tomáš creating 3d model and composing scene and one for me to put whole scene together, add depth in more subtle way and make all of the elements work together seamlessly.