Filming the Fantastic: A Guide to Visual Effects Cinematography

Chapter 2

The Fabulous Art of Matte Painting

A great development in visual effects was the latent image matte process. This tech- nique involves the use of mattes to selectively obscure a portion of the frame, enabling this unexposed section to contain a new element shot at a later time. The ability to spread out the task of compositing elements over time was a vast improvement over the foreground miniature and glass shots, in which everything had to work all at once. The idea behind this technique is that photographic film does not “expose black,” unlike video, which actually records a zero component, or black. If a black silhouette is photographed using motion picture film, the emulsion regards that area just as it would a darkroom. The film ...