How did a painting on glass become a movie's skyline?
The Emerald City, Xanadu and the Star Wars tractor-beam set were all partly paintings, and the first matte shot was a hurried job on a sheet of glass.
▶ Start the storyA painter did the building work. A matte painting is a painted picture of a landscape, a set or a faraway place, made so that filmmakers can create the illusion of an environment that is not at the filming location. Instead of building a castle or travelling to a mountain, a studio hired an artist, and technicians combined the painting with the live action, which is called . At its best the effect is seamless, and it shows places that would be impossible or too expensive to film.
Traditionally the artists worked with paints or on large sheets of glass. The first known matte painting shot was made in 1907 by Norman Dawn, who improvised the crumbling California missions for a film called Missions of California by painting them on glass. After that, painted worlds crept into famous scenes: Dorothy's approach to the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, Charles Foster Kane's Xanadu in Citizen Kane, and the seemingly bottomless tractor-beam set of the first Star Wars film. In King Kong, the jungle itself was built by layering glass paintings.
There is one catch. The painted part is static, and the movement has to be added onto it, so the trick suits scenery that sits still.
Step 1: Expose part of the frame
Only one area of the film sees the live action
Step 2: Run the film through again
The same piece of film goes back through the camera
Step 3: Expose the other part
A different image, such as a painting, fills the rest
Step 4: Two images in one frame
The audience sees a single, seamless picture
In the 1980s, computers arrived. The first digital matte shot was made for Young Sherlock Holmes in 1985, where a painted window was scanned into a computer and a computer-animated knight leapt out of it. By the end of the 1990s, the time of hand-painted mattes was drawing to a close.
1907
Norman Dawn paints the California missions on glass
1933
King Kong's jungle is built from layered glass paintings
1985
Young Sherlock Holmes: the first digital matte shot
1990
Die Hard 2 scans a glass painting into a computer
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Recap
A matte painting fills in the part of the picture the camera could not reach, and the painted part stays still while the live action moves in front of it.
💡 A trick to remember it · Think of a window with a painted view: the actors stand in the clear glass, and the painter supplies the faraway world.
Surprising fact · Die Hard 2 combined a traditional glass painting with live action by photographing and scanning it into a computer.
Sources (2)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (13 claims) cites at least one of these.