Coyote Blog

Matte paintings from the pre-CGI movie era are total catnip for me, and are probably my favorite topic in film.  I remember first learning about matte painting after being blown away with the the huge hanger scenes and infinite drops on the Death Star in Star Wars.

The Matte Shot blog has another great post up about the golden age of matte paining,  This blog does not produce a lot of posts but when it does, they are long and fascinating.

People act as if it is something new and different when actors shoot scenes and 95% of the space on the screen is later filled in by CGI.  This has actually been going on for decades with matte paintings on glass.  Movie scenes were either filmed directly through the glass (there are some great examples in the linked article with Disney artists painting sailing ships on a bay for filming) or reshot later by projecting the original film and reshooting it with the matte art.

Here is a an example before and after the painted matt.  Just like CGI, only CGI can add movement and dynamic elements

I had thought all this stuff was done in post production but apparently Disney at least shot a lot of scenes straight through a matte.  I love this guy, sitting on the beach painting ships on glass so they would be sitting on the bay in the scene.  You can almost imagine the actors tapping their feet waiting for him to be finished.

Much of the beauty of the original Star Wars movie was in its great matte paintings, not only of planets but of the large Death Star interior scenes.