HISTORY & INTRODUCTION

Visualize them. Picture them. Digitize those various pieces for a whole. Matte paintings are the majestic and graceful background vistas integrated with live-action, foreground situations in motion pictures (and some television programs) serving to establish a space for a scene. Matte paintings are certainly large, beautiful, breath-taking vistas that are subtle which are also the under-appreciated work in motion-pictures.

Since the advent of the narrative film, moviemakers have strive to enhance the scope of on-screen reality by combining non-existing landscapes, interiors, and structures to give credibility to a film's story. Afterall, movies are meant to transport the audience into another realm and time. Not only is the aesthetics and origins of the matte painting dependent heavily by a particular genre of film (science fiction, fantasy, adventure, and yes, drama and comedy), but it is also a spectacular artistic piece worthy of its own artistic merit. Despite the ability to deceive an audience with a well designed and executed image, matte paintings usually go unnoticed, overlooked, and often are relegated to an ancillary level of working diegetic components in a film. And as special effects, editing, music composition have transcended into the digital age, the matte painting has successfully transitioned from the traditional glass canvas to being a cut and pasted composite of the computer. And though no debate has emerged whether the digital technology will replace traditional matte composition and techniques, the ability to compose a fictitious reality by computer undoubtedly saves time.

Origins of the Matte Painting

In the last couple of centuries, paintings were regarded as the definitive replication to portraits, landscapes, and life. When photography became available to trained professionals, painting traditionalists called the new novelty many unkind words, including, "A cheap way to reproduce reality." Painters did not want to face the harsh reality that their expertise and business faced an uncertain downfall. The mass public always preferred the highest definitive portrait of themselves.

Typical French artists in 1862 formally protested that photography was a "soulless mechanical process, never resulting in works which could . . . ever be compared with those works which are the fruits of intelligence and the study of art." Early photographers resented such assertions, regarding photography as another form of painting where "still life is self-consciously composed in the style of neo-classical painting." During the 1860's, composite photography became a commercial success for Henry Peach Robinson. His composite combined several negatives to form final prints to a real subject set against drawings. In 1905, a photographer named Norman Dawn derived from this creative approach. Using paints to enhance his own still photographic pictures, Dawn was taught that by placing a sheet of glass between the camera and the subject improvements could be rendered (of the subject). Thus, the origin of the matted image is believed to have been born. Along with it, the manipulation and merging of reality with pseudo-imagery on celluloid.

A Digital Tomorrow . . .

Those early pioneers acted on evolving innovations that benefited their trade. Perhaps traditionalists were apprehensive and unwilling to adopt to the new form of image capturing. And now with the digital age having been ushered into cinema so profoundly, matte painters and 3-D renderers can assert those traditional techniques amalgamated with modern high-technological tools.

In 1982, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan featured the first-ever computer-generated effects for its "Genesis" sequence. As the camera races over the planet's surface, life (oceans, land, forests, mountains, lakes, etc.) forms rapidly from a dead planet at an accelerated rate. This scene is powerful and more exciting than the proposed static matte shots that would have dissolved and faded into cinematically from one image to the next in showing the planet's emerging life. Two years later, The Last Starfighter produced digitally animated spaceships, given a three-dimensional look, for a crucial battle sequence in lieu of using miniature model ships. Premier special effect houses began surveying into potential ways to save money, cut time, and present a richer, more realistic and exciting look in motion pictures. Such computer-generated renderings would go on to be featured in numerous films like Batman Returns (1995), Restoration (1995), French Kiss (1996), Titanic (1997), The Lord of the Ring trilogy (2001, 2002, 2003), the Star Wars Special Editions and Star Wars prequel series. Matte paintings and digital composites have also found their way into music videos, including those of George Michael, Madonna, Britney Spears, and Jennifer Lopez.

Prominent in the field was the artistic matting painting. Where the average matte painting can take three weeks for completion, the digital matte rendering can be completed in half the time, if not sooner. The digital procedure can also mimic a sweeping, realistic, clean three-dimensional look compared to the more static 2-D matte painting. These digital renditions of skies, buildings, planets, boats, space ships, landmarks, and much more truly present a graceful awe over the static (but never banal) matte painting.