Matte Painting – TimeLine
The Early Years
1902 - Georges Méliès films A Trip to the Moon, using actors in front of painted backdrops to create a fanciful journey.
1903 - Edwin S. Porter directs The Great Train Robbery. Porter creates some of the first…
Matte Painting – Sudden Impact
Titanic
Bram Stoker's Dracula
Casino
"The invading army was the technical people who built the machines. At first we [artists] were all confused traditional matte painting and digital was a head-on collision. There was lots of…
Matte Painting – The Force
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
Dune
The Love Bug
"What's great about matte painting is you get to control a little bit of the movie. Sure, you've got everybody telling you how to do it, but you get to bring across some narration,…
Matte Painting – Way of the Artist
Mame
Colossus: The Forbin Project
"Al Whitlock taught me things mostly by osmosis. It was about being around him, seeing him. Al didn't believe in drawing out a shot. It was about the energy of the moment when he was painting.…
Matte Painting – Big Picture
The Great Race
Ben-Hur
It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World
"It was always effective, when you went to the big films in those days, that people actually were so moved by the impact of these tremendous big screen cataclysms and effects……
Matte Painting – To War and Back
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
Since You Went Away
"We had a sign over our barracks: 'Is This Trip Really Necessary?'"Lou Lichtenfield, matte artist and WW II B-17 bomber pilot
United States participation in World War II with war…
Matte Painting – Dream Factories
Spellbound
Citizen Kane
Forgive me if I say that one of the many fields in which the Selznick International pictures were way ahead of the rest of the business was in their enormous use of matte shots, optical effects.When Gone…
Matte Painting – Wonderful Magic
The Thief of Bagdad
Wizard of Oz
For a long time [in the post-studio era] Hollywood seemed to forget the wonderful magic that you can create, like the scenes we did in Alexander Korda's The Thief of Bagdad…. Alex Korda would…
The-Invisible-art-Matte-Painting-Pioneers
I have some amazing memories to tell you about a time and place now lost in the dark shadows of the past.Norman Dawn
Trailblazers set a course into uncharted frontier, map unknown terrain, make the rules, and lay the foundations…