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MillimeterMatte Painting Legends
Aug 1, 2002 12:00 PM, by Michael Goldman
 3D wireframe models show how digital matte paintings were used to build a fictional version of the Grauman's Chinese Theatre in the 2001 feature, The Majestic. Photo courtesy Craig Barron. |
Craig Barron considers his 10-year odyssey to co-author the first book on the art and history of feature-film matte painting, The Invisible Art: The Legends of Movie Matte Painting, the equivalent of “an archaeological dig.”
Barron, a veteran artist and co-founder of San Francisco's Matte World Digital, and industry journalist Mark Cotta Vaz, penned the almost 300-page, hardcover tome, published by Chronicle Books and available this coming November, largely based on a decade of interviews and research done by Barron on the history of his profession.
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“I started doing interviews 10 years ago, thinking it might lead to a documentary,” says Barron. “But over the years, I noticed that matte painting has been covered in chapters of various books on visual effects, but there has never been an entire book done about it. After all, the whole point of matte painting is to create invisible illusions, which is where the book's title comes from. For years, studios and filmmakers kept the work these people did secret in order to keep from spoiling the illusion. Mark and I wanted to chronicle their work and shed some light on something that remains a key aspect of filmmaking to this day.”
 Mario Larrinaga's matte painting of the Xanadu edifice under construction (top photo), among the classic examples cited in the new book, The Invisible Art: The Legends of Movie Matte Painting, was combined with a foreground construction site built out of miniatures and shot stop-motion for the "newsreel" segment in Citizen Kane. Photos courtesy Craig Barron. |
Barron emphasizes that some of the most famous shots in film history were largely created using traditional or digital matte paintings — Tara from Gone with the Wind, the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane's' Xanadu, King Kong's' Skull Island, versions of Imperial Rome in both Ben Hur and Gladiator, Bodega Bay in Hitchcock's The Birds, large portions of the original Star Wars films, and hundreds of others, most of which are documented in the book.
The book covers the industry's early pioneers, as well as the conversion from paint and glass to digital tools and CG effects, and the history of matte cameras and optical printers. “Today's digital artists can really benefit from understanding this history and seeing the historical connections between what artists like Norman Dawn, Jack Cosgrove, Peter Ellenshaw, Albert Whitlock, and dozens of others pioneered and what today's artists are doing on modern films,” Barron adds.
“As early as the 1930s, you saw examples of what today we call virtual set technology,” Barron says. “Its roots go back to the studio matte departments in that era, who would largely create spectacular sets with artwork to be combined with sparse practical sets to build an image. That's why this history should matter to today's industry professionals, and that's why we put so much effort into this book.”
This being the digital era, the book also includes a digital supplement — a CD-ROM bound into a pocket — that shows a series of moving examples of the various projects highlighted in each chapter of the book, starting with original plates, and then showing final composites evolving at the click of a mouse.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
