Working In Digital Media- Ron Crabb
March 24, 2010This week we didn’t have a guest lecturer, so instead we were all instructed to watch a video on Creative Inspirations, I chose a talk given by Ron Crabb. Ron Crabb is an American motion graphic/visual effect artist and matte-painter who works on big film productions.
Ron got his first taste of working with graphics when he moved to California and started working printing sports t-shirts. Designing the t-shirts lead into logo design. He managed to get an interview, and a job, doing graphics for newspapers. However, when computers arrived in 1985, Ron lost his job as a primary graphic designer for the newspaper – but he did get a freelance job at night. Ron was allowed work on the computer all by himself during the night, creating 1-2 graphics for the newspaper and then learning and creating on the computer. Ron admits that his career path has been unplanned, and that he has been lucky to have been given the opportunity to work and create and to learn new skills.
Ron says he is a man of faith and wants to be an artist and wants to create because “there was somebody who created me, created us”. Ron says that is his inspiration and that art is something that connects people, brings people together and something everyone has in common. He says that being good at what he does makes for a “pretty good life” and although it can be tedious at times, he knows he is lucky to have a job that he can create in order to out food on the table for his family.
I was so impressed and amazed by Ron work as a matte-painter. A matte-painter is somebody who creates backgrounds for movies. Ron first work as a matte-painter was on the X-Men films, working on the dramatic film scenes of the films. He has since worked on other big Hollywood films such as Speedracer and The Bucket List.. Ron says the work can be challenging, as computer technology grows he finding clients are requesting and expecting close to photo quality scenes, and he says that crossing the fine line between artistic and real can be very difficult to close – especially coming from a fine artistic background.
Ron showed off some just some of the work he has done, creating matte-painting for scenes in Speedracer and The Bucket List. Ron has to put every little detail on a separate layer, and make his paintings work depending on how the camera will move in the film’s scene. The paintings must also be very high resolution, sometimes over 12,000px.
Ron says working in the digital world allows for more “what if .. “. It allows for errors, and it allows for change a lot easier than phyical work, such as oil-paintings.
