Welcome! This is essentially a blog with the sole purpose of showcasing professional and personal art works created by Marko Ljubez. Furthermore this space serves as a trackback diary, displaying random thoughts, things that inspire me, movies and music I like, food I enjoy and more. This blog is in development. More to come soon.
I had the sudden urge to take some moody black & white aerial landscape photos. Unfortunately my private Jet was temporarily unavailable, so no go. Decided instead to "photograph" it using 3D and Photoshop while waiting for my other renders to finish. Too me it doesnt really matter how the image was conceived, what matters is the feeling you get when seeing it.
The following is one of the matte paintings I created for the Ilta-Sanomat spot. The art direction called for a Victorian-type industrial building. A 3D model of the scene was modeled, shaded and lit. This material was used as a base for the matte painting. The 3D model also served as a guide for the green-screen shoot in order to extract correct camera angles. The greenscreen shoot itself resulted in filmed "workers" which were later composited over the matte painting. Moving machine parts were rendered as separate passes and inserted into their respective positions at the compositing stage. This saved time as we only rendered animated parts and did not need to calculate the heavy 3D scene for each and every frame throughout the animation.
This is a recently completed project for Radiotjänsten, which is part of the swedish public service with the task of collecting TV Licence fees nationwide and verifying payment of them. This was a full on campaign intended for showcasing on the internet, tv and cinemas around the country. Stopp offered full service assistance throughout all media-departments. The interactive movie, featured on the campaign website offers the visitor the chance to upload their own pictures and have them automaticly inserted into the movie content. So far the movie is a success generating over 5 milion unique views in just about 3 weeks time. My work included helping director Max Vitali to extend his plates with help of matte paintings. The movie was shot on Canon 5D Mark II by several small crews around the world and proved itself to be a challenge at the compositing/tracking fase due to the shearing and compression of the material. The following images are just some of the matte paintings i created for this show.
The short movie "Herr Rodebjer" is the first in a series of creative and interactive editorials from Rodebjer, aimed to further emphasise the strong vision of the Rodebjer brand. The premiere editorial "Herr Rodebjer", a short movie directed by Mattias Montero, has since its premiere won the Public Prize award at the A Shaded View On Fashion Films Festival, held at Centre Pompidou in Paris. My work included rebuilding almost all of the environments, originally shot in Paris, with help of matte paintings according to the Directors whishes. A high contrast silhouette appearence was applied to all the skylines in order to achieve what Mattias was striving for, with the intention to resemble surreal theatrical side-scene flat sets. Further compositing work was done by Crawford Reilly, Linus Eriksson, Julius Denizhan and Peter Marin. For a sneak peak watch the trailer bellow...for full movie visit Rodebjer (Editorials).
A small update before i head on home. The following matte painting was a Vue experiment, trying to see if i can combine some of the features this software offers with my own way of working. The entire image (except for the balloons) is a 3D generated model, including procedural terrain, spectral atmosphere and volumetric clouds. The advantages of this software are huge especially in the conceptual stage of a project. Hopefully I will have some time over to render a full on 3d-camera move but as for now here is a still frame. Enjoy!
Here is a recent job I worked on where I once again had the previlegie to work with director David Dawoodi. I guess he was pleased with our previous collaboration and so was I, making this a really enjoyable project to work on. The idea behind the movie is basically to evoke a mysterious, heavy atmosphere without giving away to many answers. To add to this my job was to give life to the miniature flowers by turning them into some sort of lamp-like creatures, emiting light from the jawline, forming the much familiar signs that are so often associated with Playstation. The look of the light emiting was something David had a very clear vision of which made things much easier once time came to create the effect. Furthermore almost every scene underwent the process of adding digital snow, removing wires and adding digital condensation representing the breath. I used Softimage, Adobe Photoshop, Shake and Adobe After Effects for the whole project. David felt that the movie was incomplete while lacking an establishing shot in the beginning so the task of creating the very first shot was giving to me. This shot was solved by a camera projected matte painting and some fun compositing to make it come alive. All in all it was a very fun project to work on, much due to the good relationship with the director who really showed a sence of trust and confidence towards me and my work throughout this project. This is pretty rare behavior but at times when it occurs it elevates the work and boosts the will to deliver something extra due to responsibillity that comes along with it.
Production Company: Independent
Director: David Dawoodi
Executive Producer: Jani Guest, Richard packer
DoP: Kristoffer Johansson
Editor: Håkan Wärn
Post Production: stopp
Colorist: Carl Skaff
VFX Lead: Marko Ljubez
VFX Artist: Johannes Carlsten
Online: Jonas Jäderholm
Sound Design: Dead Mono, Erik Thorsell
Post Producer: Robert Feniger
Here is the making of the very first shot. I did the matte, camera projection and compositing on this shot.
In this ad for ATG, directed by Mats Lindberg (Traktor) our job was to fill the streets with horses. Detailed preplaning, painstaking rotoscope work on allmost all shots and numerous other tricks was the recipe to to make this work since all the vfx-shots were filmed in several passes. My work on this job involved rotoscoping, wire removals, adding contact shadows underneath horses legs, making matte paintings and clean plates. It was a big job but much fun to work on. Cudos go out to the whole team for keeping up the spirit and delivering.
Post Producer: Robert Feniger, Ann Krogstad
Online: Julius Denizhan, Crawford Reilly
Vfx Artist: Arvid Björn, Marko Ljubez, Andreas Eidhagen, Mikael petterson, Caroline Ortmark, Quentin Olszewski, Linus Eriksson
Sound Designer: Edward Björner
Here is a making of one shot. On this particular one I rotoscoped out the stuntmen to the right and made a matte/cleanplate for the background. Several people worked on this particular shot. More making of videos to come.
The following clip shows how we made the 10 second version of this commercial where we had to remove all the wires, change registration plates on cars and remove shadows from the ceiling but still remain true to the original material. The biggest issue here was the tracking due to the lens distortion caused by the very wide lens used for this shot. My job was to create the moving cleanplate, which involved Photoshop and Shake work but also a bit of Boujou. This shot was filmed handheld but curiously enough it was in the scope of a nodal pan which enabled me to do this with a 4 point 2D track. Rotoscoping of the horse was done by Andreas Eidhagen, assisted by Caroline Ortmark.
This was a piece done for director David Dawoodi. My work included turning of various light sources, add smaller retouches such as eye-blink removals and driver removal. The bigger part of this job included making an aerial POV of a city where lights go out. The solution was to make a matte painting of a city, paint two versions, one with lights turned on and one where they appear to be turned of. These images were then split up into layers and camera projected onto 3d geometry in order to achieve correct parallax and a desired camera move. Water was made in 3d due to reflections. Once rendered the material was then composited and the blackdown was adjusted according to the directors desire. I used Photoshop, Softimage XSI, Shake and After Effects. Below you can view a still image of the matte painting. This was later color graded to fit together with the rest of the movie.
For this ad the job was to replace human heads with big over-sized four-clovers. My work included concept development of the clover, 3D textures for the clover 3d model, full execution of the "womb-shot" including styleframe concept, matte painting, modeling, animation and compositing.
Production Company: Moland Film
Director: Joachim Trier
DoP: Jakob Ihre
Producer: Mone Mikkelsen
Post Production: stopp
Post Producer: Robert Feniger
Online: Jonas Jäderholm, Johan Boije, Crawford Reilly
Vfx assistans: Caroline Ortmark
3D Artist: Arvid Björn, Marko Ljubez
3D Animator: Niklas Lundgren
Matte Painter: Marko Ljubez
Colorist: Björn Frithiof
Sound Designer: Erik Thorsell
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