In this exercise, I used After Effects to create a composition. I opened up After Effects and used these settings:
I grabbed my images from the internet under the creative commons license. Then I placed the images into the project tab (left-hand side of the user interface). From there I dragged the mound image into the composition itself. I used the pen tool to go over the image by tracing around the earth mound area.
What the pen tool does is that its like the 'polygonal select tool' in photoshop. This tool gets rid of everything outside of the pens zone that hasn't been covered or selected, You can drag out the axis points out and can expand until you have the full image. In my case I only needed the mound so I was satisfied with what I had.
The next image I added into the composition is a mountain range. This would play as the background image for the composition.
The last image I dragged into the composition is a stone house. I would use the pen tool to go around the house I wanted to use inside the composition.
After placing the stone building into the composition, I went into the timeline right-clicked, and did 'new > camera', I didn't have to make any changes to the camera settings so I left them as default, to be honest. Adding the new camera into the composition I played around with the image layers (cards) and started changing up perspectives of the cards themselves. On the bottom area of the "composition or viewer" tab, I changed the viewer from 1 view to 4 views.
I would be experimenting with different perspectives and zoom-ins and outs on the layers/cards themselves.
If I had any thoughts to spare on the after-effects composition matte painting exercise it would be that this had helped refreshed my memory and it was simple enough for me to do. Considering I had experience with After Effects and matte paintings in the past this helped. One thing that I did not know you could do from After Effects was that you can change the camera views into 1's 2's and 4 views.