Matte painting

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Matte Paintings (from English "matte" = mask, "Matte Paintings" = attachment painting) are painted parts of backdrops in film sets that have been applied to canvas or glass. Nowadays almost all matte paintings are created digitally .

As early as 1907, Norman A. Dawn of the American Society of Cinematographers painted a matte painting for the film Missions of California . In black and white films like King Kong and the White Woman , the technique also known as "glass shot" was also used. Between two panes of glass, which were parallel to each other at a greater distance, the King Kong doll, moved slightly, was recorded in a single-frame process. The camera was in front of the two panes. Precisely painted elements such as plants such as trees and grasses were applied to the first pane. The roughly painted elements such as the sky and clouds could then be seen on the second pane.

The recording of a scene in front of a painted canvas , and later also a moving canvas, saves time-consuming outdoor shots . Until the 1950s, the artists of the Matte Paintings were not mentioned in the end credits or placed in a different category because the productions were embarrassed to save money in this way.

Today there are also matte paintings for rear projection (fill images) and background images in digital compositing, including blue screen technology. During production, a kind of collage is made by the matte painting artist , mostly on the basis of photographs, and parts of the scene are digitally painted - how much is painted depends entirely on the scene. Matte painting is often associated with the green and blue screen process , in which the protagonists act in the foreground and the green or blue color surface in the studio is later replaced by matte painting. The use of 3D computer graphics is also not uncommon. In compositing programs, the various levels of the painted background, particle effects (smoke, haze, etc.) and the actual film recording are combined and their color moods, saturations and other attributes are matched.

Current examples of film productions in which a lot of matte painting was used are e.g. B. both Star Wars trilogies, the Lord of the Rings trilogy , The Chronicles of Narnia or Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong , as well as in all 3 series V: The Miniseries , V: The Final Battle and V - The Extra-Terrestrial Visitors come .

Significant matte artists

literature

  • Mark Cotta Vaz, Craig Barron: The Invisible Art. The Legends of Movie Matte Painting. Chronicle Books, San Francisco 2002. ISBN 0-8118-3136-1
  • Peter Ellenshaw : Ellenshaw Under Glass, or, "Going for the Matte for Disney" . Camphor Tree, Santa Clarita Cal. 2003. ISBN 978-0-9646059-6-1
  • David B. Mattingly: The Digital Matte Painting Handbook. Indianapolis, Ind .: Wiley 2011. (Sybex books.), ISBN 978-0-470-92242-2

Web links