All of the visual effects work involved matte paintings. “Some of them we had good source footage stills that I used predominately to break apart in Photoshop and assembled in layers as a matte painting,” explains Bateman. “The second of which was my limited 3D modeling ability at the time allowed me to make rough geometry for locations that would be viewed at different times through various angles or lighting. I rendered out those template angles and photobash on top of it from stock images. I had a whole arrangement of hundreds of photos on my hard drive that created a library. The whole movie was composited in After Effects. In each of the layers I could have animated birds or overlay stock footage of moving grass. Then I could copy and paste that into each new shot.”
There are no 3D water simulations in The Wanting Mare. “It was figuring out how to stabilize stock footage of water taken top-down by drones, tilting that as a flat layer, overlaying it on the matte painting of still water, and when it’s out of focus it catches enough of the waves to be like, ‘That’s moving water,’” remarks Bateman. “The city was also a giant challenge because I started way bigger than I needed to. I was able to put in the highlights and gains of those city lights knowing that the threshold of the lens would blow them out of focus and turn them into twinkling lights. If I had a master 3D model of the city none of that stuff would be happening. I was effectively accommodating for how the matte painting would look when it was out of focus. Some parts would be bright. Other parts would be dark. Knowing that meant that I could achieve a look that I would want. But if you were to see the matte painting in focus, it actually looked worse because I’m drawing big highlights and window lights.”
