1 · Hi Dylan, first of all welcome to CG-Node and thanks for the time you´re going to spend answering those questions, much appreciated. Tell us a bit about yourself and your professional and artistic path

Thanks for having me. Well, where to begin? I am a southern california native who grew up loving to draw. I first thought I might be a comic book artist, but when I was about 14 I started to paint. It was first just a means to color my comics, then it became an obsession. I then thought I might be a sci-fi/ fantasy book cover illustrator. It was when I picked up the art of star wars books and saw traditional matte painting, that I found my true calling. It had everything, photorealistic painting, sci-fi and a huge audience!

At the time I was a purely traditional painter and a bit of a snob about it, so when I found out it was being done digitally, I was shattered..

I eventually bought a mac and learned photoshop. An internship at ILM when I was at UCLA really helped me see how professional matte painters were working. I just sat in my room and painted until my work started to look like the level I had seen at ILM.

2 · When you first started as an artist and studying art, you focused more on the traditional arts, like painting. How has this influenced your art today?

I think it has influenced me a lot. You learn a lot about color by pushing paint around on a palette. I think the foundation in perspective drawing has been just as helpful. There are WAY too many matte painters who can't even put a building in perspective.

3 · Your first professional job was with Illusion Arts, working on "The Time Machine". How was it working on such a movie without the experience you have now?

It was incredibly exciting. Syd Dutton is a matte painting legend to work for him was amazing. I just tried to do my best and crank out a lot of work. I cringe when I look back on it now, but for my experience I think I did okay. I didn't feel any pressures of being on a big film, Syd was good about not letting that get in the way.

5 · What can you tell us about your experience working on "Lord of the Rings" and the challenges involved in working on such a movie?

Working on Return of the King was an amazing experience. It was a tremendous challenge on many levels, but I think I learned a lot on the way. I had only been working professional for less than a year before I got that job. So to get the call to go work on tat project was a huge thrill.

My girlfriend and I moved out of our apartment and moved down to New Zealand for a year. It was a challenge working on a film that had such high expectations. There was a lot of pressure because the first two were such big successes. There were also many creative challenges. Figuring out the look of Mordor and Mount Doom was a huge challenge. It was kind of like doing a portrait of one of Peter Jackson's children without having met them.

I worked on one Mordor painting on and off for eight months. Also the look of the giant ash cloud over Pelennor fields was a bear. A lot of the difficulty came from the fact that Peter Jackson doesn't like matte that much.

If he could built a miniature for all of Mordor, he would have.

So we were sometimes the last people to touch a shot when we probably should have been involved earlier. I think I did some of my best work in the last two months because there was no more time to screw around, and hem and haw.

4 · You have worked on such different movies like "Lord of the Rings", "I, Robot", Dare Devil" or "Memoirs of a Geisha", just to mention some of them. What kind of research you do for such different kind of projects? (ci-fi, current time, asian, etc..) And, how do you develop those different visual styles so successfully?

Well, it usually just involves looking at a lot of photos. If it is a film like Lord of the Rings, then I need to see a lot of artwork that has been done so I know what the appropriate look is. Usually I have some sort of brief that pushes me in a general direction. Once I know roughly what I am going for, I scour my library of books and buy others. I also do a lot of image searches on the web. The internet is an amazing resource for any kind of research. As for developing the different styles, it is just about creating a homogenous image that fits with the time and the film itself. You have to realize that you are creating a single shot in a movie, not a fine art painting.