The Blob (1988)
This Chuck Russell directed and Frank Darabont scripted remake of the 50's sci-fi favourite was not a box office success and is now largely forgotten. Which is a shame, as it's a clever and exciting B movie which captured the appeal of the genre in a similar fashion to the more fondly remembered Tremors.
The matte painting here is from the opening of the film.
The painting - by matte artist Robert Scifo - was photographed using split screens, dividing the painting into eleven horizontal strips, each shot with a slightly slower camera move than the strip beneath to impart a sense of three dimensional perspective to the painting. A roll axis was added to the camera as well, making the shot look remarkably like a real helicopter shot. It's an interesting comparison to a similar opening shot from The Witches of Eastwick a year earlier. That one was an actual helicopter shot, but shot with a high tech gimbal so steady that it made the shot look like a matte painting!
Foreground clouds were photographed as a live action element and composited into the shot by Dream Quest Images, who had been doing striking work in the couple of years leading up to The Blob in films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and were not far off winning Oscars for work in films like The Abyss. Throughout the 80s, there were two big effects companies in the Hollywood effects industry - Industrial Light and Magic and Boss Film. Dream Quest was the first new fx kid on the block to really give these two companies serious competition in terms of innovation and quality of work. Of course, seven years later the industry became dominated by digital technology and the number of fx houses producing world class work ballooned. Still, in the age of Digital Domain and fx houses in Europe and Australia becoming well known, Dream Quest held their own, being bought by Disney and producing terrific work for Mission to Mars. And then being unceremoniously shut down by a studio that decided it didn't really need a costly in-house fx facility after all. But I digress... here's a screencap from the tail end of the shot, after the composited clouds have cleared the frame...
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