Matte Painting & Environments

Here is how the work lines up. Matte-painting and digital-settings work in New York runs through senior settings departments at the Chelsea VFX houses. Framestore, The Mill NY, Method, MPC, DNEG and Brickyard — alongside pro boutiques in Brooklyn DUMBO and the LED-volume operations at Steiner Brooklyn Navy Yard and Silvercup. The city's settings artists have shipped period New York (turn-of-the-century streetscapes for Mrs.

Here is how the picture comes together. Maisel, mid-century corporate interiors for Succession-adjacent dramas, surreal corporate settings for Severance), fully digital extensions for HBO Hudson Yards series, and the Marvel and DC features whose plates leave New York needing wide sky replacement, skyline reconstruction and digital geography. Our planning places projects with settings teams scaled to shot volume — a senior Chelsea facility for several hundred 2.5D and full-CG settings on a theatrical feature, a mid-tier Brooklyn boutique for a streaming series running on the NYS Film Tax Credit, or a focused team for set extensions on a New York commercial shoot. We manage reference gathering across the five boroughs, make sure production designers and VFX supervisors are aligned through pre-production, and structure review cycles around ftrack, Shotgrid or Frame.io so feedback travels efficiently between New York and global producers.

Here is what we have to work with. The tech pipeline distinguishes from \1D matte paintings for locked-off shots, 2.5D projection work where the painting is mapped onto simplified Nuke or Maya geometry for camera moves with parallax, and hybrid 3D-painted settings where Houdini or Unreal Engine 5 geometry carries dynamic camera moves through a painted set.

Here is the layout. Artists working out of New York studios match the first photography for lighting direction, colour, atmospheric conditions and lens traits, and the Brooklyn DUMBO talent pool brings traditional matte-painting craft — composition, atmospheric perspective, period research — to digital pipelines built around Photoshop, Nuke projection workflows, Maya, Cinema 4D, Substance Painter and Unreal.

Here is how the work shapes up. Historical and period settings draw on wide NYC archival reference through the New-York Historical Society, MOMA and the Museum of the City of New York, and on-set oversight captures HDRI, witness camera angles and survey data to make sure settings lock against the practical photography. Final delivery covers DPX or EXR sequences in ACES, ProRes masters for edit finishing and IMF packages for streaming masters, with the NYS post-prod uplift logged alongside IATSE Local 700 forms where the project qualifies.