Great Matte Paintings #3 - The Birds

The Birds (1963)

I could fill dozens of these posts with matte paintings from The Birds. Albert Whitlock's extraordinary work is peppered throughout the film, helping to create the township of Bodega Bay, replacing sunny blue California skies with dark thunderheads and most famously in the stunning closing shot, representing an unprecendented (in 1963) complexity of compositing. The shot here is my favourite, however - a trademark Hitchcock oblique extreme high angle, reducing human civilisation to geometric blocks on the screen and people to mere dots. A piece of live action footage nestles right in the centre of frame - a lick of flame across a carpark. As if that wasn't enough, the shot is soon filled with dozens of swooping gulls, each one painstakingly rotoscoped by hand.

Here's the painting, showing the black area where the live action footage will be inserted.