The Dying Art of Visual Effects
The Dying Art of Visual Effects
Feb 15Caught a link on the Orlando Sentinel that Peter Ellenshaw has died.
Ellenshaw is the big name that always comes up when one talks about matte artists, those who practiced a dying (if not long-dead) visual effects artform for film. Basically, they’d paint detailed background scapes that would be inserted into a shot where one wanted to, say, depict Victorian-era London but not build a mock city on a backlot somewhere.
(He won an Oscar for Mary Poppins, by the way.)
Whenever matte painting comes up, like a good lil’ nerd, I always think of Star Wars. Those old vintage making-of specials feature the occasional glimpse of the matte artists–I seem to recall attention paid to the matte used of the Death Star shaft where the Emperor died, and another one of that gorgeous shot of Endor at night with the Imperial Shuttle flying into frame and landing.
Anyway, whether because of retirement or lack of work, Ellenshaw’s last recorded work on IMDB was uncredited mattes for the 1990 version of Dick Tracy. That seems to jibe well with the early dawning of digital effects, so ILM’s busy elves were probably already scurrying about to find ways for computers to do the work that artisans had once done by hand.
I’m no anti-CG absolutist–it’s an art form, just as practical visual effects were an art form–but it remains far more exciting and mysterious for me to watch classic visual effects. Even when you know how it was done–when you have seen the man behind the curtain painting his beautiful mattes–it draws me completely in.
