Over at The Intrepid Engine, an unattributed matte painting was a mystery that was happily solved with Tineye’s excellent image search tool. Tineye examines an image and returns a series of matches from the web: it’s a great way to re-identify some of the countless pictures on the web that have lost their makers through thoughtless reposting.

And this turned out to be a very happy find. It was the work of Yanick Dusseault, production artist, matte painter, and now an art director at Industrial Light and Magic. The image at the right is a part of that original mystery picture; it looks a lot like Gotham City in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films. Curiously, those films don’t show up in Dusseault’s extensive credits – even though The Lord of the Rings, Gattaca, Pirates of the Caribbean, Revenge of the Sith, and a gazillion other amazing films do. So go figure.

But anyway it’s inevitable that the image above is the one that grabbed me, since I’m always up for The World of Tomorrow.

In my entire life there have been only twenty seconds when I wanted to work in film, and I got over it immediately. But I always enjoy the work that these folks do, and here, especially. Dusseault’s gallery is a wonderful, ongoing body of work.

About all I found to like in the Star Wars prequels were the matte paintings and complete shots of the cities; that and, okay, the one scene where Obi Wan used his Jedi trickery to convince a lowlife to rethink his life (there was a whole and much more interesting movie in that single scene, I thought). It’s a pleasure to get a peek behind the curtain at one of the people who brought those places, and others, to life.