week 15- SFX of the past- Matte Paintings

Like I said in class, the sfx people of yesteryear had a tough job to optically create SFX for the viewers.

 The art of the glass shot or matte painting is one which originated very much in the early ‘teens’ of the silent era. Pioneer film maker, director, cameraman and visual effects inventor Norman Dawn is generally acknowledged as the father of the painted matte composite, with other visionary film makers such as Ferdinand Pinney Earle, Walter Hall and Walter Percy Day being heralded as making vast contributions to the trick process in the early 1920’s.

 
Boiled down, the matte process is one whereby a limited film set may be extended to whatever, or wherever the director’s imagination dictates with the employment of a matte artist. In it’s most pure form, the artist would set up a large plate of clear glass in front of the motion picture camera upon which he would carefully paint in new scenery - an ornate period ceiling, snow capped mountains, a Gothic castle or even an alien world. An area of the glass is left clear and unpainted, through which the actors may be photographed simultaneously with the matte art onto the original negative, producing an entirely convincing ‘new’ shot without the need for the production unit to leave the studio grounds.

There are many technical variations of the matte process, some of which are outlined in the selections below. All of the films included here are from the pre-CGI era and the processes utilized are exclusively old school ‘photo-chemical’ with the artists’ instinct and his cameraman's’ keen eye, long before the advent of the ‘undo’ button. Before computers came around to make filmmakers' lives a little easier, production artists used to create paintings that would fill the backgrounds of the movies for filmmakers. These days all of that stuff can be placed in digitally during the post-production process, but when films like Star Wars and Indiana Jones were made, this is how they did things, along with using models and other practical effects.