Game Trailers and Matte Painting

So my lead is making a promotional video (in a ridiculous amount of time, like 3 days, and we're going right after blizzard, crazy) and I am amazed at how well it's looking, more specifically how he's achieving the illusion of high quality with limited resources and time. He's using a matte of the sky, sliced and overlapped a few layers, that skew for the duration, that totally gives the illusion of a huge sky (if you know to look you can see in a corner odd looking mountains.) And we're using our in game models, with high res textures. Then he keeps each shot very short, with camera movement and character movement (which are tricks he's used before) and some god rays and viola, looks great. I'll post it once it's done.

But while we were talking about making it we looked at this Guildwars 2 cinematic, which is also pretty decent looking, especially when you consider they're just cutting up and wiggling their concept art.

Guild Wars 2 teaser trailer from ebonhawke on Vimeo.

So now when I watch this fun trailer by Fortiche Productions for Academy of Champions, everything looks like mattes.

Academy of Champions from fortiche production on Vimeo.

good things to keep in mind to up value, and shorten time. also a nice way to show off concept art.