Matte Painting is an important element in visual effects. It has been around for more than a hundred years. It is used to help extend areas in a shot.
For example, if you need a junglescape in the background, but you don’t have enough money in the budget to shoot it on location you can have a matte painter create it. It also helps you give your shot the right kind of weather you want in the sky. It can also re-create historical places like a 48 BC Egypt in “Cleopatra."
Painters paint on glass, put it in front of the camera lens. Half of the elements in the shot are live action, and the rest is a painting. The matte painting has to be in position so they appear as one. Another way of doing it is to put black tape on the glass, and cover up the spots that are going to be replaced with a matte painting. The black was the green, and blue screen of that time.
Matte painting started in 1905, a decade after movies were first made. Studios did not want to pay millions of dollars to shoot on a real location, with mountains, or huge buildings. It also felt impossible to build. Then Norman Dawn, a film director/photographer/artist/inventor, had created the matte painting technique that would help give the filmmakers the kind of shot they wanted to see. It would merge paintings, and cinematography together. Matte painters create the worlds that would be impossible to build, and/or have enough budget for. Matte painting can also be used to add people in a small scale, the size of ants, with larger painted elements surrounding them.
Matte Painting in movies
Matte painting has been a real help to movies such as the "Star Wars" trilogy, "The Wizard of Oz", the "Indiana Jones" trilogy, "Planet of the Apes," "Gone with the Wind," and many others. Without matte painting, there wouldn’t be a castle for the "Wizard of Oz" characters to skip straight to, or a ruined Statue of Liberty at the end of "Planet of the Apes."
For "King Kong," there were a few shots where it wasn’t just putting glass in front of a camera lens. Behind the glass would be little modeled trees, and bushes, and a painted background. Plus, there was the King Kong puppet. Each one would be on a separate table, which is like three different layers. Through the camera lens, it looks like they are all merged together as one.
Painted backgrounds are usually obvious, where as using matte painting gives a more realistic three dimensional feeling.
Matte Painters
Peter Ellenshaw was one of the most famous matte painters, and possibly Walt Disney’s favorite. 1950’s "Treasure Island" was the first movie Ellenshaw did for Disney. Then Walt Disney moved Peter Ellenshaw from England to Hollywood so he could work at his studio. Walt Disney was really impressed with the work Peter Ellenshaw did, and very fond of him too. Peter Ellenshaw may have been the lead matte painter at Disney studios. In 1965, Peter Ellenshaw won an Academy Award for special effects for the paintings he did on “Mary Poppins”.
Ellenshaw’s son, Harrison, looked up to him and became a matte painter himself. Harrison was working on the 1990 film “Dick Tracy” and he needed some help. Peter Ellenshaw was retired, but he decided to come out of retirement to help his son work on the matte paintings for “Dick Tracey”. It was the last movie Peter Ellenshaw ever worked on.
When Harrison Ellenshaw started his career as a matte painter, he worked on Disney features like his old man. Then he met George Lucas, who was putting together a visual effects company, Industrial Light & Magic, and was a matte painter on the first two original "Star Wars" movies.
The last person I like to talk about is Robert Stromberg. Stromberg started becoming interested in matte painting at age 12. He saw a documentary on matte painting, and he knew what he wanted to do in life after that. Robert spent a lot of time teaching himself how to be a matte painter, and he developed skills for it. By the time he graduated high school, Robert was already finding work as a matte painter. People are impressed with how a skilled artist like Robert Stromberg could teach himself how to be a matte painter. He also has an eye for detail, and color. Today, Robert is a two time Academy Academy award winning production designer for his work on James Cameron’s “AVATAR," and Tim Burton’s "Alice in Wonderland.”
Going Digital
By the mid ‘80s, things were starting to go digital. People used to create effects through hand crafted techniques, but now they can create effects through computers, including matte painting. Instead of painting on glass, and putting it in front of the lens, you can just paint it digitally on a computer. Matte paintings were also looking more real.
Chris Evans, not the one who played Captain America LOL!, was the first artist to do a digital matte painting.
Now a days everything is digital. By using software, such as Clip Studio Paint, Photoshop and/or Nuke, matte painters are able to use digital technology to create environments, backgrounds, etc. rather than actual paintings. Some techniques used now include overpainting on photographs to create 2D paintings. They would then be imported into Maya or 3DS Max to make them three dimensional.
Conclusion
Matte painting is something I’ve been working on in my VFX class at Exceptional Minds, and I find it very interesting. What I do is take different pictures, and erase certain parts of them. For example, let’s say there’s a shot where you just want the house, but not it’s surroundings, because you are going to replace it with something else. You are combining parts of different images together as one. You are also making sure that they blend together with hue and saturation. Once I’m done with it in photoshop, I import all the layers into Nuke, and make my matte painting image three dimensional. The matte painting you see bellow is the one I did in class.
