Chris Wesselman

Epic “Leafmen” (Blue Sky Studios)

Blue Sky Studios | 2013 | Digital Matte Painter / Compositing Lead

The environment work on Epic was about building a forest that read at two scales simultaneously. From the human perspective at the film’s opening, it’s a normal New England woodland. From the shrunken perspective that the film spends most of its time in, the same trees become cathedral columns, the undergrowth becomes a dense jungle canopy, and the distance between the forest floor and the light filtering through the upper canopy becomes a vertical world of its own.

Sky and atmosphere setups had to support both registers without feeling like different films. Projection and atmosphere work across the forest sequences was designed to maintain depth cues (atmospheric haze, light direction, the density and species variation of the scatter) that would read correctly regardless of which scale the camera was operating at. The miniaturized world needed to feel physically real, not just visually small.

The forest sequences in Epic are some of the most atmosphere-dense work in Blue Sky’s catalog. Owned environment and sky across multiple sequences, with projection setups and atmosphere rigs that let lighting and comp iterate without rebuilding the environmental depth from scratch each time.