first Matte Painting test with Final Cut and Photoshop

This is the first matte painting I have created. It was a lot more difficult than I thought to find pictures that fit with the video I shot. I tried to make it suck less by adding an explosion. My movie is supposed to take place during the apocalypse, so for my test matte painting, I tried to find pictures of rubble and bombed out buildings. I found some good pics on Google images, but I couldn’t make them work for the narrow neighborhood street I had filmed. I think matte paintings work best with wide open spaces. This gives me an idea of the kinds of locations I should be looking for when I shoot my movie.

I used Photoshop CS3 and Final Cut Pro 5, with footage shot on standard definition mini DV tape. I also watched a tutorial on matte painting I found on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYBlN74uAz0