Great Matte Paintings #5 - The Thing

Perhaps I should rename this series Albert Whitlock's Greatest Hits. These are shots from John Carpenter's 1982 paranoia classic, The Thing. First, the live action footage of actors against a bluescreen...

The live action footage composited on top of an Albert Whitlock painting of a crashed spacecraft...

A frame from later in the shot, demonstrating the patch of light shifting across the craft and the crater wall, a subtle touch which adds realism to the shot...

And two further shots of a second matte painting from later in the scene, again demonstrating the effect of shifting shadows on the painting...

Great Matte Paintings #4 - Dune

Dune (1984)

Although he supervised all of the matte work for the production, this was the only painting in Dune painted by Albert Whitlock himself. A gorgeous painting, brought to life on film using typically genius Whitlock touches such as live action smoke elements and shifting shadows (there's another great example of this technique in John Carpenter's The Thing), as well as the more self evident model spaceships (a terrific piece of design by Tony Masters) composited into the shot.

Albert Whitlock

Albert Whitlock with his matte painting for Dune (1984).

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.

Great Matte Paintings #2 - Dune

Dune (1984)

This one is a pretty extraordinary piece of work. The painting - by Syd Dutton working under the supervision of legendary matte artist Albert Whitlock - was on two separate pieces of glass (one for the foreground cables) and had spaces left in for exposure of live action footage of extras walking around on wet concrete. Further exposures of live action overlays for bursts of steam and flame...

 

...plus a miniature cable car shot against bluescreen...

 

...plus a motion control camera move tilting up to follow the cable car...

...make for one of the great matte paintings of the 80s.

Great Matte Paintings #1 - The Blob

 

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...