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Bruce Block (left) on
location in 1990 to shoot a plate for a matte in the film NOTHING BUT TROUBLE,
and Ken Marschall with a glass painting done in 1987 for a Disney-MGM Orlando
Tour demonstration film. Also shown here are some of the original matte
paintings from WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT, STAND BY ME and MOBSTERS.
A COMPANY CALLED MATTE
EFFECTS:
THE WORK OF
KEN MARSCHALL & BRUCE
BLOCK
Part One
It probably wouldn’t be too much of an
overstatement when referring to the illusionists featured in this edition of NZPete’s
Matte Shot as two of the truly unsung heroes, as it were, of the latter period
of the traditional hand painted matte shot era.
Matte painter Ken Marschall and cameraman collaborator Bruce Block laboured quietly without publicity nor self promotion for
nearly two decades producing a
sizeable number of matte painted effects shots from the early 1980’s onward
through to the end of what we might call the ‘photo-chemical era’on what would amount to a considerable catalogue of productions from James
Cameron’s big breakthrough hit THE TERMINATOR, the Emmy Award winning effects
shots for the highly regarded television miniseries THE WINDS OF WAR, the
coming of age classic STAND BY ME and a number of genre movies such as FRIGHT
NIGHT 2 and the deliriously wacky KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE among many others.
Ken and Bruce would
operate quietly under the radar on scores of features and commercials – so far
under the radar in fact that their anonymity extended beyond the average movie
goer and would even slip by unknown to many within their own industry.
I’ve been wanting the opportunity to profile Ken
and Bruce’s career for some time, and after an extended period of email
exchanges I feel privileged, now that both gentlemen have some spare time, to be in a
position to speak at length with Ken and Bruce about their respective careers and take an
in depth look at the wonderfully invisible trick
work the duo have been responsible for, often without screen credit and always
without fanfare.
.jpg) Readers of this blog
and fellow lovers of traditional matte work will be astounded with the caliber
of the matte shots featured in this comprehensive career Q&A, of that I’m certain. As a researcher and matte historian myself I
am all too frequently deflated by the lack of existing artwork, photographs,
film clips and memorabilia still available from this once essential though now sadly lost artform. I can happily report that this is NOT the case with Ken and Bruce’s
career. Ken has carefully retained all
of his original matte paintings – with only a few exceptions where art may have
been given to a director upon completion of the shoot. I am delighted that Ken has also kept the
majority of the 35mm film clips, before and afters and layout drawings as
well. There is literally so much material that as it stands, this article will be a two (or maybe three) part blog post – and even then not all of the projects can be covered. You will be impressed. .jpg) Most images in this blog
are from Ken’s or Bruce’s personal collection. Others are credited on the
picture. Scanned motion picture frames are from original film test clips in
Ken’s and Bruce’s files, and although these may technically be the property of
the various studios that commissioned the work, this blog is intended to be a
respectful homage to these films, and we trust that their posting will be
considered flattering. A few other images were found online and are seen so
often, without credit, that they are assumed to be basically public domain and
that no toes are being stepped on by including them here.
I’d also like to extend my gratitude to Gene Warren jr. for his valuable and sincere contribution to this article.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Q:
I'd like to welcome you both and say that I appreciate your time and efforts in getting this career retrospective off the ground. Let’s start with you Ken. Tell us
a little if you will about your background prior to entering the movie
industry.
KM: Art isn’t something I kind of gravitated to
as I matured. I was creating as far back
as I can remember, whether it was building something with Lincoln Logs, cutting
up cardboard to make an imaginary spaceship, drawing with crayons or colored
pencils or of course painting. My mom
used to tell the tale of how, at around the age of three or four (c. 1953-4) in
our home in Whittier, California, I got into her supply of Jello and sprinkled
the different colors in designs on the carpet like a sand painting. I was apparently just about to add water to
the creation to deepen the colors when she appeared and stopped the fun. Although she stifled that particular
creation, she was otherwise encouraging of my artistic inclinations and even
got me oil paint-by-number sets as early as when I was in about second
grade. I can still close my eyes and
smell that paint in those little plastic tubs.
By fourth or fifth grade I had my own set of “adult” oils in tubes and
was painting on canvas boards. And I
drew a lot. I had a particular
fascination with trains, planes and ocean liners.
Q: It seems you were literally ‘born to
paint’.
 KM: I have many other interests –– archeology,
astronomy, architecture, photography, science in general –– but I’ve always
fallen back on art as the mainstay. I
have a perfectionist trait, so I naturally tend toward accuracy, detail and
photorealism. My best friend as a child,
Rick Parks, whom I met in second grade right after we moved to La Cañada,
California, and who was a gifted artist, lived only a few blocks away, and we
routinely painted, drew, built models and dreamed up various projects
together. Constant creativity. While my brother busied himself playing ball,
I had to be quietly creating something.
I remember I loved relief maps and made several while in elementary
school, carefully painting the various hues for mountains, deserts, ocean and
so on. I recall making a diorama of a
Viking ship in a cardboard box, with painted sea, wake and sky with clouds,
done around third grade.
As I matured in the “let it all hang out”
’60s, Rick tried to get me to loosen up and just splash paint on canvas in an
abstract expressionist way, to paint what I “feel.” But it was nigh impossible,
way too accidental, not nearly enough thoughtful deliberation for my
liking. To this day, careless splashes
of paint proudly shown off as profound, high art irk me. Sure, the colors might go well with a carpet
or sofa, but aside from that they are a pretentious excuse for art. To me, art, at a minimum, must be conscious
and requires at least a degree of intent.
Throwing paint over your shoulder at a canvas and then rolling around in
it is little more than a messy accident.
And when accidents become art, when graffiti vandalism is celebrated as
art and considered just as valid and worthy of analysis and praise as, say, a
da Vinci, then anything can be art,
and fine art loses any specialness.
Without ugliness there can be no beauty.
It’s highly insulting to the great masters to give any sort of
equivalency to some of the careless modern art we see.
Q: As a lover of ‘traditional painting’
myself, I couldn’t agree more with that summation Ken.
KM: I
recall a segment on Dateline or 20/20 not too long ago where a bunch of
first graders were each given a canvas and asked to paint whatever they
wanted. A selection of the resulting
works was then put in expensive frames, and a phony gallery exhibit opening was
advertised and staged in an upscale area of Manhattan. An actor pretended to be the artist, touted
as New York’s newest undiscovered sensation, and Fifth Avenue prices were
slapped on the pieces. Hidden cameras
rolled as he mingled with the patrons and made up ridiculous stories about the
profound inspiration behind each of the works.
It was hilarious to see the public fawning over his “sensitive”
brushstrokes, identifying with the deep meanings behind the “unique” paintings,
how he had conveyed his angst so successfully.
At least one connoisseur made an expensive purchase, eager to get in on
the action before the artist’s prices climbed, the buyer later confessed.
It’s a sting I’d hoped for years to see,
proving exactly my point –– that anyone can throw paint on a canvas and that so
much of the art scene is pretentious silliness.
Jackson Pollock himself admitted in an interview once that his work was
“not to be taken too serious.”
Q: I can just see the self righteous pretense
in that room dissolving and oozing out under the door as those ‘connoisseurs’
realized it’s game over.
KM: My
art teacher at Pasadena High School, Rollie
Younger, offered eye-opening lessons that have stayed with me through the
decades. His mantra when teaching the
more realistic drawing and painting was “Observation. Take in what you’re really seeing, not what
you think you see. Get past your
preconceived ideas. Is that shadow
really just ‘grey’? Where’s the key
light coming from? How about bounce
light? What reflections
do you see? Where are the vanishing points?”
My interest in
photography grew, and soon a friend helped me disable the shutter mechanism in
my old Brownie Starmite camera so that I could actually take time
exposures. I was fascinated by this
new-found ability and soon purchased a Pentax Spotmatic SLR camera, had my own
darkroom and developed black-and-white film and prints. Later, I processed and printed color.
Q: Yes, a great deal of fun, but for me colour
processing was a nightmare and I gave it up in despair. So Ken when did the realisation of ‘special
effects’ or trick photography in motion pictures hit you.
.
KM:
I was always riveted by special effects in movies, creating what never existed
or, even more interesting to me, re-creating
what once was but is now lost. It was
pure magic to me. How did they do that?! One effects movie unexpectedly set me off on
a lifelong career path. Around 1965 I happened
to catch the 20th Century Fox movie TITANIC on TV, the one with Barbara
Stanwyck and Clifton Webb, and although I had heard of the ship before, the film stopped me in my tracks. It captivated me. The largest liner in the world, said to be
unsinkable, on its maiden voyage, carrying the wealthy and influential of two
continents on a mirror-flat ocean, glances against an iceberg one moonless
night and vanishes in less than three hours with the most horrific loss of life
of any peacetime sea disaster. It was
the most evocative, gripping, incredible tale I could imagine, a story so
audaciously amazing and unlikely that even at the tender age of 14 or 15 I
doubted it could have really happened that way.
Surely this was pure Hollywood.
 I quickly got a
copy of Walter Lord’s acclaimed book A
Night to Remember, a minute-by-minute, you-are-there account of the
disaster, and discovered that, in fact, the substance of the movie was no
exaggeration. It was true history. With my passion for recreating what has been
lost, a spark was ignited. My original, beat-up copy of that book, purchased at Vroman's bookstore in Pasadena in 1966, is shown at left. I felt
compelled to build a large model of the ship.
Along with a friend I’d met in junior high, Chris Bragdon, I embarked
upon the balsa-wood model project, researching Titanic’s deck plans and appearance as best we thought we could
using the local library. My old friend
Rick occasionally helped, as well.
I struck up a
correspondence with Walter Lord himself who graciously engaged this inquisitive
teenager with my endless questions, supplied information and further shipyard
plans to assist us and who put me in touch with others of like mind. When the hull of our eight-foot-long model
was nearly complete we discovered even more plans of the ship which showed that
hopeless mistakes had been made in our model’s contours. Being that perfectionist, that was the end of
that.
But hell, I thought, I can paint. Why not paint
the ship instead? I did a small 16 x
20-inch oil of Titanic at sea,
steaming along happily in bright sunshine.
Someone saw that and asked me to paint a much larger scene of the ship
–– my very first commission. That was in
1969.
Before long,
word was getting out that I could do decent paintings of the legendary
liner. They appeared in various
magazines, then in books, and I soon had a budding career bringing Titanic back to life with my
brushes. A stickler for accuracy and
detail, my research into the subject grew, and model kit companies asked me to
help with technical advice on their projects.
Q: So, even at that young age you appear to
have been the ‘go to guy’ on The Titanic.
Where did this passion lead to next.
Q: I’ve heard some marvelous accounts of
those matte painter lectures and would dearly have loved to have been in a
position myself to get my foot in the door.
Whitlock’s seminars were always highly acclaimed.
KM: During
one of the matte painting demos a scene came along where a telephone pole or
electrical wire could not be removed before an expensive shot was filmed, and
had to be painted out later by the matte artist. It was mentioned, however, that new
technology was being developed for the film industry that, just like with the
Mars Viking lander, could one day pixelize film into tiny squares that could
then be adjusted or blended using a computer, and such things as an unwanted
pole, wire, or a “Roman” extra who forgot to remove his wristwatch could be
easily stitched out using this process.
The class gasped with a mixture of surprise and awe. What a miracle, and a revolution, that would
be, we thought… to digitize film and make any changes you want!
In 1977, at the age of 26, I was hired by
Director Stanley Kramer and Production Designer Bill Creber as the advisor on a
gigantic 55-foot miniature of history’s most famous liner for the film project
RAISE THE TITANIC, based on the best-selling book by Clive Cussler. Designed and constructed at CBS Studio Center
in Studio City, California, this model would be “the largest Titanic since the Titanic,” as I proudly told anyone who would listen. (The one built for the 1953 film was about 28
feet.)
 It was my first hands-on foray into the film
industry. I worked at the studio for six
months, doing my best to be in several places at once, trying to make sure that
no mistakes were made in the miniature that could be avoided. “We want to get this right,” Creber said, “so
what Ken says goes –– within reason.”
You can imagine how thrilled I was to be given that kind of authority
and expecting that, finally, for once, a Titanic
miniature would be built accurately (the ’53 one built by Fox left much to be
desired). Most of the time I was
tolerated by the set designers and construction crew, but of course I didn’t
always get my way. And, because there
was only one of me and I couldn’t be in several places at once, some minor
mistakes were made. But generally I was
quite proud and excited about the progress.
Creber told me
to try my hand at storyboarding the prologue of the film. When I presented my sketches to him, he
actually liked them. I thought he was
just being kind to a young kid, but he surprised me with his sincerity. “No, I’m serious,” he said. “This is good. I’m gonna use this.” In the end, though, the screenplay went
through several rewrites and the entire original prologue went away.
Stanley Kramer left the project when the
model was about half completed after Lord Lew Grade refused his entreaties to
increase the film’s budget. He told
Grade that he simply couldn’t do justice to such an epic tale for $7.5 million
(if I recall the figure), with all the effects his team envisioned and the
story demanded. Grade told him that was
fine, he’d find another director. After
Kramer departed, crew was let go, group by group, person by person, as
production slowed. A core bunch of us
working on the huge miniature (and other models of U.S. Navy vessels in the
same scale) were kept until the final shutdown happened in earnest. On March 10, 1978, I took one last set of
color photos and then said goodbye to my baby, which was nearly finished. I had been
told that of course I would be rehired just as soon as a new director had
signed on and production resumed.
The promised call
never came. Jerry Jameson would be the
new director, and the model was completed by a crew apparently unfamiliar with
the ship. When the film premiered in 1980 I was stunned and disappointed to not see my
name anywhere in the credits, while someone else, and his organizations, were
given the plaudits for the research and technical advice –– with no less than
three lines of credit. Ah, welcome to
Hollywood.
Q: Hollywood……Some things never change.
KM:
This didn’t dissuade me, though, from wanting to work in the film industry, in
the art field. In early 1979 a friend of
a friend directed me toward a small studio called Graphic Films Corporation, in
Hollywood, an intimate operation that produced photo-real animation and model
shots for science documentaries, mostly NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab. The potential
existed for matte work down the line, so I eagerly prepared a small
portfolio. Bruce worked there, and
that’s when our paths came together. He
was the one who interviewed me. My long
interest in astronomy, space, science and art made it the ideal fit. Apparently Les Novros and George Casey, the
bosses at Graphic, felt likewise, because in April I was hired. It was a fortunate synchronicity. I had shown up on their doorstep at exactly
the right moment; their chief artist, Don Moore, had recently left suddenly,
and the company was in somewhat of a lurch.
Q: Oh that’s very interesting Ken. I’ve recently put out an extensive blog on
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY where Graphic Films methodology and expertise played a
major role in the success of the Kubrick picture.
KM: Yes,
that was a marvelous blog, just wonderful.
I loved it. Anyway, I was immediately put to work painting backgrounds and animation cels of planets
and galaxies that would be filmed on an old-fashioned
Bowles-Acme animation crane, building Styrofoam models of asteroids and lunar
landscapes, miniature spacecraft and so forth.
My mentor there was J. Gordon Legg, approaching age 70, who had
been an animator and art director with Disney decades before. He told me how he did light glows and shadows
in SNOW WHITE and worked on FANTASIA. I
learned a lot from him. He taught me the
airbrush, something I knew I would have to learn, but being non-mechanical and
non-technical, I feared would be a great struggle. But Gordon was a good teacher, and in one day I had it basically mastered.
 One of the things I did during my first year at Graphic was
create an Earth model for STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE. It’s seen briefly on the Enterprise’s huge monitor about two-thirds or three-quarters into
the movie. I had been a huge STAR TREK
buff in the ‘60s, so to have contributed anything at all to the movie was
beyond thrilling.
Q: So, how long did you stay with Graphic
Films.
KM:
I was with Graphic for four and a half years, and it was while Bruce and I were
still there, in 1981 to be exact, that we began quietly practicing our own
matte work on the side and assembling a demo reel. The next year we founded Matte Effects and
had business cards printed up. We wanted
to stay on the down-low, so the bosses at Graphic didn’t even know.
Q:
And how about you Bruce, what was your background and how did film work
come about.
BB: My original background was in theatre and
photography. I had worked off Broadway and in regional theatre as a director
and designer. I had also worked as a
freelance photographer in advertising. I
started working part time at Graphic Films Corp. in 1973. Graphic Films had a long history of making
films for museums, the US Air Force, NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
(JPL) in Pasadena, CA. Stanley Kubrick
had done some initial planning on 2001 with Graphic Films and it was there that
Kubrick stole Doug Trumbull, Colin Cantwell and Con Pederson to help make 2001
in England. John Dykstra had also worked
at Graphic Films prior to my arrival.
Graphic Films was a wonderful little
company. The entire staff was less than a dozen people. When I arrived, most of
the photography was done by an excellent documentary cameraman named James
Connor. The animation stand was run by Ray Bloss who had worked at Warner Bros.
for decades shooting Looney Tunes cartoons (Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig,
etc.).
Q: So, somewhere around this time did you
manage to attend one of those visual effects seminars that Ken discussed.
BB: I
had seen Al Whitlock’s lectures and demonstrations. I thought his work was astonishing and tried
to interest Graphic Films in trying to do our
own. Graphic Films had one in-house
artist, a background painter named Don Moore.
Don was extremely skilled but wasn’t really interested in doing matte
paintings. Eventually, Don left Graphic Films to do backgrounds for animated
feature films.
At the time, Graphic
Films was doing some visual effects for Columbia Pictures Television. I was directing and supervising the
effects. One of the post-production
assistants at Columbia mentioned that a friend of hers was a ‘good artist and
was looking for work in film.’ This
friend turned out to be Ken. He came for
an interview and I gave him the same assignment we had given all the
interviewing candidates: Take a photo of an interesting location in Los Angeles
and then, like a matte painting, change the photo’s location into something
else. Usually the candidate never
returned or submitted mediocre work. Ken
returned in a week with a large photo of Main Street at Disneyland which he had
extended into a full 1900 St. Louis downtown.
It was impressive, and he got the job. That’s how we met. Then we started testing original-negative matte painting shots.
It took us two years to really understand the technique.
Q:
So, a question I pose to all of my interviewees – what triggered the
initial ‘trick photography’ bug or visual effects interest, and was there any
particular film perhaps that you may have seen at an earlier time in your lives
that may have formed an indelible impression upon you and set that career path.
KM: A giant flying saucer landing on the Mall in
Washington, D.C., in THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. Fantastic visions of a dreamlike land in THE
WIZARD OF OZ. An alien world and
futuristic underground structures in FORBIDDEN PLANET. DESTINATION MOON, THIS ISLAND EARTH, WHEN
WORLDS COLLIDE, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, THE TIME MACHINE, among others, all held
me spellbound with their amazing visual effects. Even the original GODZILLA (the American
release), relatively simple as it was, had me nearly lying awake nights with
its terrifying visions. Effects reached
a then pinnacle of realism with 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, a film that played
continuously in all its sweeping “Cinerama” glory at the Pacific Warner Theater
in Hollywood for what must have been close to two years, as I remember. I went to experience it –– savor it –– nine times there, if I
recall my count.
I remember fondly the thrill I always felt sitting in the best seat in the house, every time, when the
curtains parted and that deep rumble of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra began… and the hairs stood up on my
arms. They still do. The epic movie profoundly influenced my
fascination with visual effects.
One of the many slides I
took, along with friend Chris Bragdon, of SPACE ODYSSEY projected on the vast
screen of the Pacific Warner Theater in 1968, in an age long before home video,
DVDs or Blu-ray. Chris and I both brought similar SLR cameras with us that we
had rented after a search for ones with the quietest shutters. Our diligence
paid off because no one ever complained about our cameras. Most of our shots were
of the breathtaking effects scenes, but I include this brighter one to show all
the heads in the foreground to better advantage. It’s a moment captured in
time, when the film was in its first-run heyday and playing to large audiences.
(I was cleaning house recently and came this
close to tossing all these ancient slides. Then I thought, nah... I just can’t
do it. Call me a hoarder.) I believe we used Ektachrome 160, and I remember
that 1/8 second gave us the best exposure (at f/2, stopped down two stops from
wide open to increase sharpness a bit). Obviously we had to sit back in our
seats and hold the cameras quite still, but it worked. About 80% of the shots
were steady and sharp. As you can imagine, walking out of the theater we felt
like we’d defied the gods and escaped with priceless booty!
BB:
There was not one specific moment when I decided I liked visual effects. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t
interested in it. As a child I was fascinated with magic tricks, photography
and puppetry. I was playing around with special effects from an early age. As soon as I discovered the visual
manipulation you could do in a darkroom, I was hooked. I liked watching special effects in movies
and figuring out how they were done. As
a teenager I always read the credits on movies and TV shows…people I had never
met and didn’t really understand what they did. To this day I remember the
names. I worked with many of these
‘names’ when I got to Hollywood. I grew
up in the Midwest so I had no direct exposure to any kind of filmmaking. I’d see a visual effect on TV or in a movie
and go home, experiment and try to figure out how I could do the same
thing. A friend and I made Super 8 movies
and we’d build miniatures that we’d blow up with homemade pyro effects (so dangerous
and I can’t believe we never had an accident). I would make hi-con mattes in my
darkroom and composite stills to make scenes that didn’t exist in real
life. I played around with in-camera
double exposures, developed my own film, etc. In high school I built an
animation stand for photographing cell animation. It had a double column vertical track camera
mount, a glass platen and polarized lights. My high school films were very
elaborate. I had a used Bolex camera and I exploited every feature on it. I always liked everything about the theatre,
photography and movies.
Q:
What matte shot shows made by other technicians do you especially admire
and inspired you once you were involved in the industry yourselves.
KM: Although other matte artists produced some
wonderful work, Al Whitlock in particular had me with his stunningly believable
skies in THE HINDENBURG, realistic cityscapes in THE STING, and so many
other films. These movies came out long
before I was doing mattes myself, but Whitlock’s work stuck with me and
influenced me most of all. It was his
innate understanding of light and atmosphere, his penchant for evocative
backlit scenes, sweeping dramatic vistas that were completely convincing. While others often painted pretty scenes that
looked like Christmas cards, Whitlock seemed to effortlessly resist the natural
human tendency toward patterns and order and be able to create scenes that were
marvelously casual and accidental, not painterly at all, looking utterly real
on screen.
Once I was actually working in the field I
can’t really say I had a contemporary favorite.
I always harked back to seeing Whitlock’s magical demo reel and strived
to even remotely approach his level of excellence.
Q: There was a significant boost in matte
painting talent in the early 1980’s, with the generation that included people
like Mike Pangrazio, Syd Dutton, Mark Sullivan, Paul Lasaine, Frank Ordaz and Chris Evans.
BB: Like so many other newcomers to visual
effects, it was Al Whitlock’s demo reel that knocked me out. Whitlock’s methods were such a simple
technique. I had met many old timers in
effects like A.D. Flowers and Bob Mattey. I apprenticed with a couple of them
and liked physical effects, but I found effects photography and matte painting
far more interesting. As it turned out,
I didn’t have the patience or precision for optical printer work, but matte
painting and photography fit my interests perfectly.
Q:
Correct me if I’m wrong here, but I’ve always been of the opinion that a
great matte shot is as much the contribution of the effects cameraman as it is
the matte painter (and no, Bruce isn’t paying me to say that). Bad matte photography and compositing can
kill potentially the best matte painting.
I’m thinking of the old 1960 THE TIME MACHINE as a prime example where
the matte art was just murdered by terrible, magic marker, big black matte
lines that really were inexcusable. The
science was far enough advanced by that time so there really was no excuse… and
it received the FX Oscar to boot! Still a great film though.
KM: There were some unfortunate matted scenes in
that film. Although a huge favorite of
mine at the time, I look at it now, see how dated it is and think of what
fantastic sequences could be done today.
When I first heard years ago that a remake was in the offing I was so
excited, thinking that surely all the stops would be pulled out and we’d see
years and millennia whirring by with jaw-dropping, realistic CGI. Alas, there was far, far too little of this
in the remake. Quite a missed
opportunity and disappointment to me in that regard. And although Alan Young made an appearance,
neither Rod Taylor nor Yvette Mimieux had even a brief cameo. I was so hoping to see them in the
remake. I hope they were at least
invited.
Bruce was a great matte cameraman who knew
what he was doing. There were times when
I wasn’t there on location to personally apply the black camera tape to the
glass in the matte box or position black flags (fabric shields) in just the right
spot, and Bruce did so perfectly, understanding exactly what I would need and
not need in the shot. Soft matte lines
were obviously created closer to the lens while for a harder edge we’d
sometimes use a flag, shaded so as to make it as dark as possible.
In the matte
room Bruce was just as attentive when it came to the rock-steadiness of the
camera and the perfect repeatability of the alignment of the painting, which
was portable. We used old-fashioned
animation peg bars, punching a piece of heavy, coated paper card stock (later
Mylar) to fit securely over the pegs.
The paintings, which were done on that heavy card stock, were taped to
those punched pieces and then hung in front of the matte camera.
If there was any misalignment of the matte
in the test footage, I would usually just fix the painting. But once or twice there was such an
inexplicable misalignment that I plotted exactly how much to re-peg it and then
untaped the piece with the alignment holes and repositioned it.
Bruce also set up the two lights, polarized
them, and had a clever voltage dial so that color temperature could be
adjusted. He can better explain all of this than I.
BB: Again, one of the most impressive aspects of
Whitlock’s work (or any original-negative matte painter) was the
simplicity. No optical printer, no
generation loss, no special, complex machinery, etc… it
was all fascinating to me. You
really only needed a pin-registered camera, some lights and a great painter who
understood color, perspective and film…and that was Ken. When we started making original-negative
matte painting tests, we used a borrowed rack-over Mitchell NC camera. We’d go out on a weekend and film two or
three scenes, then mount the same camera on a very makeshift stand and, over the next few months, film the test
paintings.
Once we left Graphic Films and started Matte
Effects, we bought our own Mitchell camera from Armstead’s, a wonderful old camera rental house in Hollywood
(they had the camera that filmed CITIZEN KANE). Our first matte painting
photography stand was set up in my garage. I met Gene Warren in about 1980, and
a few years later he invited us to work at his facility, Fantasy II Film Effects, in Burbank. We had our matte photography room there until
we closed in 2000.
Q:
I’ll admit Ken and Bruce to really not knowing a lot about you both nor
your work in any substance until a wonderful and revealing conversation I had
in an online matte painting forum some years back with fellow matte artist Rick
Rische where the proverbial ‘shutters’ were opened to shine a great deal of
light upon the extent of your contributions in the field of matte work, a great
deal of which I was unforgivably ignorant of till then. Among other things, Rick very generously
described looking through and examining your filed away matte paintings from
many productions when he worked with you for a period at Matte Effects, and
being utterly blown away to say the least.
KM: That was kind of him to say. We did keep a low profile. From the beginning Bruce and I wanted a
comfortable amount of work, not to be overwhelmed, have to hire others and
complicate our lives. We looked at it as
a sort of professional hobby, I think.
We wanted it to stay fun and interesting, not for it to become a burden,
an obligation that we resented.
Q:
We’ve touched upon it but can you tell
us more about the company you both set up, Matte Effects.
BB: When Ken and I felt comfortable that our
matte painting tests were good enough and we had a small but competent demo
reel, we opened Matte Effects. By
design, Matte Effects was an almost unknown company. We got all of our work, and it was constant
for 20 years, through word of mouth and Fantasy II. Gene Warren gave us space at Fantasy II and
we became his in-house matte painting department. Based on our desire to “keep it simple,” Matte Effects only had two full-time employees: Ken
and myself. Matte Effects never advertised and didn’t even have its own phone
number. Our stationery and invoices listed a post office box, not a street address, and the phone number was my home
phone. We just did our work, and the studios would call us back again and
again. We never wanted to accept more
work than we could handle and we had a great time. On a very few occasions,
when deadlines were changed, we did have to hire an additional artist like Rick
Rische.
Q:
Rick described in detail your set up at Gene Warren’s Fantasy II studio
right down to the minutiae of the specially prepared art board you would import
from Europe for your matte paintings and so forth. I was surprised to learn that you always
painted on board, rather than glass, and, as Rick told me, these painted mattes
were comparatively small in dimensions where other practitioners painted much
larger mattes. I believe you prefer to
paint small.
KM: I much prefer a more manageable, convenient
size, something that will fit on my table in front of me. I paint flat, always have. This was dictated by the amount of reference
material I usually had scattered all around, often laying right on the painting
for ease of access. I didn’t want to
have to turn away from a vertical easel and step to the side to consult a
reference photo. In fact, I often
painted through a “hole” in my reference material. I also kept my water and palette (usually an
old pie tin or a piece of illustration board) right next to and sometimes on
the painting, too. I have a couple of old photos showing me at work on early
mattes back in the ‘80s, and you can see the small scale. On average,
unless they were for VistaVision, the paintings themselves are only about 18 x
22 inches, with the unpainted borders extending a bit farther around the
perimeter, to about 20 x 27 inches.
People are surprised, but I don’t know
why. Classic movie mattes were often
astonishingly small back in the old days.
I’ve never understood the lumbering size that so many matte artists
seemed to prefer in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and I always had to laugh at the photos
of them diligently at work, invariably showing them using long brushes, held
nearly at the top of their handles! I
could never paint like that. I guess this is why their paintings had to be
so huge; they couldn’t exert a lot of fine brush control with their hands 10
inches from the painting.
I
painted compactly, and only on glass a couple of times, for several
reasons: I’m comfortable working small
and tight, always been a “detail person;” the substrate that we used was a
heavy card stock, manufactured white on one side and a fairly glossy, deep
black on the other, so it made for the perfect, ready-made “matte” area of a
painting; and our routine of driving and meeting halfway between our homes to
exchange paintings for the latest test footage (we live about 20 miles apart)
demanded easily transportable artwork.
Glass would have been a heavy, arduous, risky headache. We made large carrying sleeves to transport
the mattes around. It worked great.
The card stock that we used came in sheets
23 x 35 inches. I still have a file
drawer full of the stuff. In the early
‘80s, when we started, its black surface was really good, with a certain finish
to it. Around 1990 the company that made
it discontinued their earlier process and started using a different black
surface that we found slightly less advantageous. But we made it work.
Q: I’m astounded at how little you and
Bruce actually needed in order to make a convincing matte shot. The most basic of materials and a somewhat
unconventional work space - not at all what I had expected to see as your
painting studio.
KM: Sifting through the old paintings now, I’m
surprised by how wonky and carelessly trimmed the cards’ edges are, with little
concern for perfect right angles or anything.
But as long as it was outside the painted area, it didn’t matter, so
when starting a painting I’d just cut the cards quickly and loosely. I learned in the beginning to round off the
corners so that they were easier to slide in and out of the large carrying
sleeves.
If I had commuted all the way to Burbank and
painted in or near our matte photography room at Fantasy II, I could have used
glass, of course, but I can’t imagine the point. Just the risk of someone accidentally hitting
and breaking it would scare me away from the notion. There was no need or reason whatever for
it. With the camera lights polarized, we
achieved perfectly dark blacks. The few
times I painted on glass, I think, were for a Toyota commercial (shot at Fantasy II, if I recall) and another replicating an iconic
scene from THE WIZARD OF OZ (shot at Culver Studios) for a Disney-MGM Studios
Orlando Tour effects demonstration film where
the setups called for old-fashioned glass shots. But I much preferred to work at home in my
studio and not under the gun on a stage, or worse –– outside with the lighting
changing by the minute.
Q:
The resolution holds up extremely well, even on BluRay HD format on a 55
inch LCD screen. Your paintings seem
very detailed from what I’ve seen. I was
always surprised at how much artists like Whitlock, Cosgrove, Maley and
Ellenshaw could get away with in the final scene when I’ve seen their often
very loose and impressionistic matte art, quite broadly painted yet maintaining
a level of believability often more so than tight, finely rendered pieces. The classic DUEL IN THE SUN made in 1947 has
amazingly loose, almost carefree brushwork by Jack Cosgrove, yet the
Technicolor mattes look tremendous on screen and are among my favourites.
KM: That looseness in so many matte paintings
has always astonished me, as well, and I envy artists that ability. But then, of course, their paintings are
usually twice or three times the size of mine.
At the scale I painted I just couldn’t afford to slop paint on with
large brushes, leaving obvious brush strokes, even though I knew it often
wouldn’t quite show on film. Mastering
that looseness, knowing what to emphasize and detail and what not to, is a
skill that I barely learned. For one
thing, because of our frequent transporting schedule, I never painted a matte
in oils which allows you to blend and nuance all day long. They had to be acrylic which dries almost
instantly. This means that skies, after
an average base color had been applied, were often airbrushed to achieve a
smooth blend, as were distant mountains or whatever to add haze. I used the same acrylics in the airbrush, by
the way. Worked fine. Whitlock said he couldn’t stand using
airbrush because it would always seem to spit at just the wrong moment, ruining
the work, but I had good luck with it. I
couldn’t imagine not having my airbrush at the ready.
Q: I’m fascinated with the old Warren
Newcombe matte department at MGM where, for decades, they achieved amazing
matte results using pastel crayons and mixed media.
KM: I also sometimes used a lead pencil, colored pencils,
Sharpie felt pens for super rich blacks, and often acrylic gloss medium over
certain painted areas to increase saturation and darken slightly when needed.
Q:
I’ve had the good fortune of chatting over time with other former
Fantasy II effects guys such as Spencer Gill and Ernie Farino both of whom also
have nothing but praise and admiration for what you fellows achieved…and all in
a matte room no bigger than a broom closet, or so I’m told.
KM: Well, maybe a very large broom
closet. Gene Warren, Jr., supervised the
building of the room in a corner of the sound stage, making the door light
proof, and Bruce did a marvelous job setting the whole thing up, rigging the
matte and camera stands, the lights, and a large storage cabinet. You know, both Bruce and I are incredulous
that we apparently never bothered to take a single photo of our setup. I was never far from my camera, always the
avid shutterbug, and I can’t believe
I never took any pictures in that room.
I’ve searched, and I don’t find any.
How we regret it now.
BB:
I was determined to keep everything at Matte Effects as simple as
possible. Ken painted on the special
black cards he’s described, and the size
wasn’t very large. The paintings were
registered to the artwork stand using
traditional Acme animation pegs. We stopped
using the Mitchell NC camera for the artwork photography
and indulged in a specially designed animation camera built by John
Monseaux. He had designed and built a
similar camera for Apogee. The camera
accepted standard Acme 4-perf and 8-perf VistaVision movements. The maximum
speed was two frames per second, but I could
slow the camera down if we needed blur effects or very long exposures. The
camera used standard Mitchell magazines and had bipack capability. It ran forward and reverse, of course. We don’t have a photo of the matte room but
our matte stand was a horizontal rig.
The camera was bolted to a very heavy platform,
and about six feet away was a vertical artwork stand for Ken’s paintings. The camera and art stands were welded
together with heavy steel beams so there was absolutely no chance that either
unit could independently move.
The camera was mounted on its stand like a
VistaVision camera so that in the 4-perf mode the
artwork was mounted sideways for
photography. We had both front and back
lighting for the artwork. All the lighting was run at 75 volts to extend the life
of the lamps, work at a comfortable f stop and keep the room cool. The camera
was fitted with a Nikon mount. We had one lens for the matte camera, a Nikkor Macro lens with the focus locked to
the artwork distance. That never changed. We had a whole range of diffusion
filters and color correcting filters that I’d use depending on the job.
Additionally I had built several mechanical rigs for moving moiré patterns, clouds and animated artwork for multiple-pass, in-camera effects. I really didn’t
have the patience for single-frame photography, so I built motorized rigs to do the work. All of
them had adjustable gear reducing mechanisms that could move at imperceptible
speeds if needed.
Using these rigs and multiple exposures, we
could simulate moving clouds, water ripples and flows, crowds, moving foliage,
distant cars, city lights, aircraft, etc.
I would run wedge tests to find the correct exposure, and often Ken
would color the moiré patterns with bits of colored gels from swatch books that
we kept on hand. The colored gels, along
with the moiré patterns would give us a wide variety of colors and brightnesses
which were needed for animating crowds.
Gordon Legg at Graphic Films had taught Ken how to design moirés to create the
moving patterns, and we kept a library of them
that I could rig to my mechanical devices.
Q: Describe for us if you will the usual photographic steps on a
typical matte shot.
BB: Our basic method for producing mattes was
incredibly simple. We would travel to
locations or the studios with our Mitchell rack-over camera, Nikon lenses and a
bunch of grip gear. Sometimes Ken would come, otherwise I’d bring an assistant.
After photography, I’d go back to Fantasy II’s dark room and break down the
film. Most of it went into a freezer in
my house but a short, ten-foot test strip would go to the lab. I’d always
request the lab print our dailies at the same mid-range standard that we
preferred. Using mid-range dailies guaranteed that our original-negative mattes
could easily be timed to match into the first unit’s photography. Our Monseaux-built
matte camera had a rotoscope head, so Ken or I
would roto the shot and then Ken would take the art cards home to begin layout
and color testing.
About the time we started Matte Effects, I
began producing and second unit directing
feature films, so I was usually unavailable during the day. When Ken was ready for a test, he’d call
me. We would usually meet after dark and sometimes
quite late, in a vacant parking lot near
the Los Angeles airport. Ken would give
me his matte paintings in a large cardboard folder. If an undercover cop had been watching, our
late-night meetings absolutely looked like an illegal drug deal. After the late-night artwork
pick-up, I’d drive to Fantasy II in Burbank, shoot the paintings and get the
film into the lab before the 2AM deadline. The next evening I’d pick up the
dailies, meet Ken at night in the same parking lot and give him the dailies and
the artwork. Ken would go home, paint, and when he was
ready for another test, he’d call me and we’d meet again in the parking lot. We
worked this way for 20 years. I’d produce movies during the day and film the
matte paintings at night.
Q:
Give us an impression if you can of the Fantasy II facility. This was one of those great little boutique
fx houses that were around in the 1980’s with a remarkable output that all
effects fans vividly recall, none of which I believe exist any longer.
KM:
It wasn’t huge, on an obscure side street in Burbank. You could drive past it and not even know
it. I don’t even remember a sign out
front. But they accomplished a lot
there. It was a family, really. Although a few employees came and went, the
vast majority hung in there with Gene and his partner Leslie Huntley for years
and years, through thick and thin.
Dedication and loyalty. Real
teamwork. Gene was always scurrying
around, full of energy and enthusiasm, while Leslie was in the office handling
business and scheduling. She was the den
mother. Although there were tense times
when deadlines loomed, there always seemed to me to be a casual, familial,
understanding feel there. If you needed
to take off and be someplace else, it wasn’t a problem, so long as the work got
done in time. I miss it all, and them, a
lot. Gene was always so supportive and
complimentary of me. When I thought I
had just done an “okay” job, he’d rave about how the scene looked perfect.
Fantasy II is nothing but a memory now,
though I understand Gene still has a lot of material stored someplace. Tragically, he lost Leslie to an illness last
fall, and he fell seriously sick himself shortly after. We’re happy to report that he’s doing fairly
well as of this writing. As I told him
during a visit in October, he should write a book. Just imagine the tales he could tell.
BB: Fantasy II was a great place, and I miss the facility and the people who worked
there. Gene Warren (actually Gene Warren Jr.) was a second-generation visual effects supervisor. His father, Gene Warren Sr., was a partner in the independent effects company
Project Unlimited from the 1950s-1960s and
worked on dozens of movies and commercials.
Gene Jr. is an old-school effects supervisor who knows everything about
miniatures, small-scale pyrotechnics, water
work, hanging miniatures, forced perspective, in-camera effects, stop motion,
opticals, front and rear projection, etc. As computers came into use, Gene
adapted to the new technology and combined it with the old methods. He’s really
incredible. Part of Fantasy II was a full optical printer department (Image 3
Optical Effects) and traditional down-shooter animation stands for titles, roto
and conventional animation. There was also a rubber workshop where they created
creatures and prosthetics for movies and TV shows. Over the years the Fantasy II facility
expanded and contracted to meet the needs of their work. At a nearby location
in Sun Valley, they had a large water tank that Gene specially designed for
miniatures and stunt work.
The Matte Effects room, which Gene built for
us, was about 12x15 feet. It held our matte stand, our camera gear and all of
our matte work. It was small, but it was
all we needed. When we required a larger
rig or motion control, which was rare, we’d use some of the Fantasy II stage
space.
Q:
From an artist’s point of view, describe
for me if you will how you see the matte process, as it was. What overall, really makes a matte work. What would you each describe as ‘the key’.
KM:
Obviously believability is paramount. It
can’t be cute and pretty and look like a Thomas Kinkade painting, or you
instantly give it away as being phony.
And what makes for a “pretty” scene is order, tidiness, repeated
patterns, predictability, along with saturated colors and contrast. Nothing betrays a matte painting quicker than
clouds, trees, mountain tops or rocks that appear consciously spaced, like
wallpaper. “Hmm, there isn’t a cloud
over here, so I’ll add one.” Big
mistake. The scene has to have a
natural, casual, understated, accidental, random, almost boring look, one that
doesn’t draw undue attention to the painting and distract from the live
action.
That’s one of the biggest challenges for a
matte artist or any photorealist –– to avoid the natural human inclination to
make order out of chaos. Nature is
random and accidental. Reality is
usually dirty and gritty, with flaws, disruptions, and variations in hue and
tone. Even though the side of a large
brick building may at first seem all the same, it’s not. Subtle differences in color, value, sky
reflection, aging and so forth all add to the realism and believability. Painting the whole side of the building
exactly the same color and value would feel odd, fake, to an audience, even
though they might not know why.
One of the things I learned from my old
friend Rick Parks was to constantly try to override that tendency toward
“order.” When painting the edges of rock
cliffs in a matte or waves in a maritime painting, I’d find myself repeating
Rick’s words in my head, “Variety, Ken. Variety. Break it up. Randomness.”
As
alluded to earlier, atmosphere and a sense of distance is key. Bruce often
added a diffusion filter over the matte camera lens to help in that
regard. A scene where a distant
structure is too crisp, with too much contrast, and too warm in hue, will
scream “matte painting.” I remember one
of the paintings I did for THE WINDS OF WAR where a distant Moscow is observed
through binoculars from nearby hills.
Director Dan Curtis wanted the Kremlin, which was miles away, to look
more red. “It’s Red Square…the ‘Red
Army.’ It has to look red.”
He was in charge, so I had to adjust it despite protests until he was
satisfied, but of course Bruce and I knew that it reduced the believability of
the scene.
Q: I don’t think that ‘redness’ even showed
through in the final scene as I recall.
KM: In the end I may have played it down, despite what the director wanted.
KM: Clouds are hugely important. When present,
they have to look convincing. Silly
looking clouds, too cartoony or evenly distributed, with too much contrast,
will be a dead giveaway. Painting
realistic clouds, as I said, was one of Whitlock’s great talents. It came so easily to him. He could paint skies with stunningly
realistic clouds in an hour, that I could only hope to emulate after a day or
two of fussing.
Q: Peter Ellenshaw was also a master at
skies. His fine art always inspired me
as much as his film work.
KM:
Sky brightness is another important factor. Often you’ll see skies in matte
shots, particularly old, classic ones, where the sky and/or clouds are simply
not bright enough, far below the exposure you’d get if photographing a real
scene. It’s something Bruce and I
learned early on. If the shot was
pointing anywhere toward the direction of the sun, even pure white paint didn’t
expose bright enough, and to get that white bright enough meant opening up the
lens, which started to flare and make the painted foreground too light. So, to get around that I’d create a matte on
thin Mylar to cover everything in the painting but the sky, and Bruce would run
the film through the camera again, adding a sky double exposure (DX). We didn’t use a platen or anything to hold
the Mylar flat against the artwork. What
we did was to simply rub it with an old cotton T-shirt or similar, creating a
static charge that held it beautifully against the painting, even during long
final production shots. These sky DXs
would of course be tested, shooting what Bruce called a “wedge test” (I tended
to call it “bracketing”), where he’d shoot a frame wide open, then close the
aperture down one stop for each successive frame until we had virtually no DX
at all. When the test was processed we’d
pick the best one and go forward.
And last, movement naturally will help seal
the deal with a matte shot. This wasn’t
much of an option in the old days, although with moirés we animated a lot of
little things that really helped, as mentioned.
Now with digital effects the sky’s the limit. It’s a whole new world
today, part of why the old traditional art of matte painting is so very, very
dead. Movement. Not only adding CG figures and/or vehicles in
a matte but employing sweeping camera moves, the very thing that made a matte
shot utterly impossible only a few years ago.
BB: Ken has really summed it up, but my concern
was always the “accidentals” as I called
them. Ken was painting to duplicate real
life, not a picture-perfect, fake world. So I’d always insist on adding all
kinds of ‘accidental’ things that would happen on a real location. I was spending most of my time producing
movies on locations so I knew what could and could not be controlled in first
unit photography.
 I always pushed Ken to add things to the
paintings that would occur in real life. Various changes in the color
temperature of the lighting, junk that people leave around their property,
things that need repair, evidence of utilities, pipes, wires, weathering and
aging and distant unwanted architecture are just a few things we’d add to make
the paintings look more real.
Q:
Having made a great many mattes over the years can either of you recall
that first matte.
KM: Oh yes, it was the first one we tried for
our demo reel, around mid-1981. We shot it
out at the Graphic Films annex, outside the shooting stage, looking down the
parking lot and matting off the top part so that I could add a painted
futuristic space “torus” city extending off into the
distance and upward, à la the fantastic visions of Gerard O’Neill (basically a
gigantic revolving donut in space). The
painting was done on 1/16th-inch illustration board, and I poked two holes in
it so that we could animate flashing red lights. It’s the smallest matte painting I ever
did.
Shortly after, I
finally got to paint 13 matte scenes for Graphic Films, for our Omnimax film
TOMORROW IN SPACE, which was a challenge.
Most were of the interior of a spherical control center in space, but
one was an exterior of a lunar surface complex, and I had to paint in a very
distorted way in order for the fisheyed view to appear correctly on the domed
screen. I never did get to see how the
film turned out, in an Omnimax theater.
Oddly enough, this very early job would remain the largest number of
matte paintings I ever did for a single project.
As the years passed, missing savoring the
fruits of my labors on the big screen proved to not be unusual. I never saw many of the films for which I did
mattes. I remember legendary matte
artists saying the same thing during the course at USC, and I could hardly
believe it at the time. How could they
not see the finished films with their wonderful matte paintings?! But by the time a movie is released you’re
already two or three projects ahead, you’re busy working, and it’s easy to miss
seeing some of them.
BB:
The only thing I remember about our first mattes was I didn’t have the matte
painting camera locked down properly, and
every time we did a test the alignment changed. It made Ken crazy. I quickly learned that if everything wasn’t
welded together, something always moved. Removing every technical variable from
the system was extremely important.
Nothing should ever change except the painting itself. The camera, lens, lighting and physical
shooting situation of the matte painting must never vary. The same is true when shooting the plates for
the matte. There can’t be any variables on the set when doing an
original-negative matte such
as clouds moving over the sun, etc. I would get very aggressive with directors and
cinematographers when setting up and shooting the live action. Sometimes egos would get in the way, but I never compromised and we were always invited
back.
Q:
I noticed you shared a credit for mattes with British artists Bob Cuff
and Doug Ferris on Rob Reiner’s THE PRINCESS BRIDE – was that final shot of the
valley yours Ken.
KM: Yes, that’s it. Ugh.
Talk about “cute” and “pretty.”
Certainly not one of my favorites in terms of realism. We did a separate DX to brighten the sky, but
oddly it doesn’t seem to show much in the final film. Here’s a perfect example of where the painted
sky was not bright enough and had to be enhanced, and we’re not even looking
toward the sun in the scene.
Q:
I’m told that Bruce and yourself tended to work a lot on smaller films
with the sort of subtle matte work that didn’t call attention to itself, rather
than big so-called ‘tent pole’ showy FX movies.
KM: I would have loved to work on the biggies,
but they would have likely entailed an overflow of labor and the crushing
deadlines that would have made the jobs stressful. Bruce sent our reel out to a few other
studios, but most of the work came to us through jobs that Fantasy II had. To be sure, there were times when I regretted
not pursuing the big effects houses, but honestly, as the years went by and
digital took over, I saw how stressed a lot of other artists were at these
places, with literally sleeping bags under their work stations and toothbrushes
on their desks. I realized, no, I’m not
25 or 30 anymore. I couldn’t live like
this.
BB: Back in the 1980s there were a lot of
independent effects houses both large and small. Since we were such a tiny
company, we could never compete, but we had all the work we could handle. In 1986, on CHERRY 2000, we used Apogee to
print down and scan our VistaVision shots to 4-perf. John Dykstra and optical printer supervisor
Roger Dorney had no idea our company existed and were astonished by Ken’s matte
paintings. Like everyone in town, they had never heard of Matte Effects. But we never wanted to expand. Ken had all
the work he wanted plus time to do his Titanic
research, and I was producing movies. More work would mean we’d have to hire
additional people and we never wanted to do that.
Q:
There must be a number of projects that you worked on together where you
never received a credit, and I’m thinking of shows like THE JOSEPHINE BAKER
STORY which had some beautiful work indeed, especially that glorious night shot
outside of The Stork Club with everything painted except the principal actors.
I was astounded when you told me that even the taxi, driver and reflections were
part of your extensive matte. Probably my favourite Marschall shot of all! I saw that on tv over 20 years ago and was
wondering for years who did these mystery mattes.
KM: “Jo Baker,” as we called the project, was
one of the biggest jobs we had. I wasn’t
credited for that? Go figure.
Anyway, the nighttime Stork Club matte is
neat, I agree, although the front of the foreground taxi is too fisheyed and
tweaked. Bad planning on my part. But I liked the night cityscapes which
required multiple DXed lights and flashing red beacons above roofs.
We first tried the flashing neon in one of
our earliest demo mattes –– “Terry’s Desert Oasis Café.” We had the word “Terry’s” in green neon and
made the “s” sputter, flashed the word “Café” on and off in red (with the “A”
burned out), lit the word “Cocktails” up in pink and had a bunch of yellow
lights in an arrow. It totally brought
the scene to life.
“Jo Baker” is an example of a rare job that
was overwhelming, and we had to bring in another artist to assist with a few of
the paintings. I’m ashamed to say that I
don’t recall who, probably Rick Rische, although he doesn’t seem to have this
project listed in his filmography.
BB:
On THE JOSEPHINE BAKER STORY, I went to Budapest where the film was
shooting. The original plan was for me
to supervise all of the shots and do them as original-negative mattes. What I ended up doing was teaching the crew
about original-negative mattes and then being sent back to California. They ended up shooting all of the plates
without me and everything was done as an optical. We worked with that director,
Brian Gibson, on several of his movies.
Unfortunately, credits back in the 1980s
were not yet evolved into the endless, everyone-on-the-movie triple-column
lists that we see now. We never got credit for a lot of our work, and even on the Internet it’s impossible to find
an accurate list of the movies and TV shows we contributed to. In doing this interview, I realize there are dozens of matte paintings I don’t remember at all.
Q:
There are, or should I say, were a number of processes available to the
matte shot cameraman in completing a composite shot with artwork married
successfully with live action plate: bi-pack, dupe separations, rear process
projection as preferred by Disney, interpositive duping stock as favoured by
the Doug Trumbull organisation and of course, the old and for a time largely
neglected latent image technique using all original negative, as strongly
endorsed by Albert Whitlock. What was your
particular method for achieving such excellent matte comps.
BB:
Due to our association with Fantasy II, we got involved with all kinds of
processes. Gene Warren had a lot of rear-screen projection equipment, and he used it all the time for stop-motion work
or miniature composites. Ken was occasionally called in to add a sliver of a
matte painting to cover a seam in all kinds of shots. Occasionally Ken did
paint in the orange-base process to reduce the number of optical printer
generations in a complex composite shot.
We favored original negative for all the
obvious reasons. Often, we’d do an original-negative shot and then as a latent
image, turn it over to Gene’s optical department who would add moving smoke,
mist, occasionally a waving flag, etc. If we had enough film for testing, we
could do multiple passes in the matte camera, additional work on an optical
printer and still stay on the original negative. I could bipack hold-out mattes
during the original-negative matte photography, too, if necessary. Our matte
camera room had a special window port behind the art stand. I could open the
port, and that gave us access to using a
single-frame rear projector that was actually mounted outside the matte room
and projected onto an RP Screen directly behind Ken’s artwork. But a rig that complex was extremely rare for
us. That was one of the great advantages
to being at Fantasy II. Gene encouraged
everyone to do whatever it took to get the shot right.
KM: There was nothing like in-camera original
negative. Whitlock was right. No better way to keep the grain down and
preserve all the light and shadow detail and color of the original photography,
both live action and painted. Several of
the jobs I worked on were optical composites, and although necessary, the
results were never as good. Bad things
happen when you “optical.” A VistaVision
matte I painted for CHERRY 2000 showing a collapsed Hoover Dam matched the live
action perfectly when we delivered it, but today, watching the thing on YouTube
or one of the video sites, after optically cropping in tight on the live action
area, the color match is awful, terrible. I have no idea what happened.
Q:
There’s a phenomenal night time matte you did for the Diane Keaton film
BABY BOOM with the entire frame painted except the people – with buildings,
trees, cars and even all those party balloons and lights completely matte art
that looks first generation. If ever
there were a definition of the term ‘invisible art’ then this one is it!
KM: Thanks.
I’m proud of that one. Two of the
painted cars in the foreground belonged to friends. The salmon-colored ’57 Chrysler Windsor just
left of center belonged to my then roommate, and the antique black car once was
driven by a dear friend, Edwina (Winnie) Troutt MacKenzie, who survived the Titanic disaster and had recently passed
away at the age of 100. It was my little
tribute to her. We ran a moiré behind a
light DX to make a string of lights twinkle on the house.
BB: The BABY BOOM matte painting is my
favorite. I was a producer on BABY BOOM,
and when the movie was edited we realized we needed an establishing shot of the
barn dance location. We couldn’t go back to Vermont so I suggested we do the
matte. About 90% of the scene is painted.
The live-action plate was shot in the parking lot of Fantasy II with a
bare minimum of lighting and the Fantasy II crew as the extras. Everything
except the doorway, one truck and a few people is Ken’s painting.
 
 
Q:
I take it there were times when the shot required additional generations
or integration with other elements where duping was unavoidable. Were there any tricks that you Bruce would
initiate in order to maximise image quality and not compromise Ken’s art
through contrast build up and grain.
BB:
We always knew in advance if a matte scene was going to get too complex. We would do just about anything to keep it as
an original negative. This meant pre-planning multiple in-camera exposures or
handing off the latent image original negative for a few passes on an optical
printer. Occasionally we’d shoot VistaVision so we’d begin with a bigger
negative that could go through the optical and not sacrifice image
quality. We’d rent the VistaVision
camera from Paramount who still had a couple of their old VistaVision
non-blimped cameras. They were clumsy to
use and unbelievably heavy, but they had been refurbished and the movements
were extremely steady.
Q:
I’m thinking of a shot such as the crane down camera move over the town
in THE LADY IN WHITE with the painted cityscape in the distance, likewise a
push in to what appears to be an extensive painted night shot of The Whitehouse
and street for THE NAKED GUN 2 1/2;
were these motion control shots.
BB: The LADY IN WHITE shot was a Fantasy II contract, and Gene Warren supervised that big crane
shot which combined rear projection, Ken’s matte painting and a miniature. I
honestly don’t remember how we did it.
The NAKED GUN 2 1/2 scenes were all
original-negative VistaVision lock-off shots.
Pacific Title did moving scans using a motion control optical printer to
add the camera movement and reduce the shots to 4-perf.
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Q:
Studying mattes of old I’m
forever fascinated with the choice of blend in bringing together the painted
and actual elements. For decades mattes
mostly appeared to be soft edge blends, which to my mind were far less visible
and really impressed me no end as to how those veteran matte exponents were so
successful in running a soft matte straight across the frame regardless of
foliage or architectural considerations, not in the slightest conforming to
hard lines of fences, walls and what have you, yet still managed to somehow
bring it all together so skilfully with the artwork. Jack Cosgrove at Selznick, the guys at Warner
Brothers in the 30’s and 40’s were so
good at this and it seems just second nature.
I’d imagine colour matching to be some sort of instinctive ‘know how’ on
the part of the artist.
KM: It’s all in the careful rotoscoping of the
live action, which we did by placing the negative in the matte camera and
projecting it onto the white side of the card I was going to paint on, so it
was at the exact scale of the required painting. The card was hung from the pegged backing and
carefully taped down at the sides to assure that it stayed put.
  
Then, if the scene was a daylight one,
mostly painted and had little black live-action area, I would often just paint
directly on that white side of the card.
For the area where the action would go I used Cel-Vinyl black (made by
Cartoon Colour which, amazingly, is still in business). I found that to be the darkest black
available after coating it with gloss acrylic medium or varnish to really make
the black as deep as possible.
Polarizing the painting during shooting made the black completely
dark. On the other hand, if the majority
of the painting was to have the black, I’d carefully transfer the rotoscoped tracing
(perspective, horizon line and other relevant details) onto the black side of
the card, making sure that the peg holes were in the same location, and then
paint on that side, leaving the glossy black surface alone as it was quite
black when polarized. As the painting
was punched before the rotoing, it always went back and hung on the pegs in the
exact same spot for shooting the tests.
In scenes with man made structures I followed
the perspectives in the live action while getting closer with the colors in
each test until the match was right. I
always started out by painting a bunch of color chips and taping them along the
matte line to see which was closer. Each
test narrowed down the options, and I got closer to the perfect match. It’s not as difficult as you might
think. Just takes a few tests. With a soft matte line you play with that
edge until it disappears in your tests.
With a hard matte line, alignment is more critical, of course, and
again, it’s just a matter of improving it with each test. And you’re definitely using the finer brushes
when finessing a hard matte line.
 
Q: Talk to us about colour matching.
KM: Matching colors is easy for me –– with
normal film and processing. What was
challenging was when we had a job that required the “orange-base” process where
I had to paint in low-contrast yellow-greenish hues, yet the tests came back
from the lab in normal colors. There
were several of these orange-base jobs.
I think the most difficult one for me should have been the easiest –– a
simple soft-edged patch for a matted-out spot in the middle of a distant scene
in ALLAN QUATERMAIN. Looking down into a
valley, a featured stone wall structure needed to be added. Trying to get the exact hue of the surrounding
landscape, and to blend it properly in this bizarre, alien orange-base process,
was next to impossible. Test after test
after test. I’d use colored pencils for
some of the subtlest of hue shifts in an effort to get a match. First an area was too magenta. Then with the slightest of green tint the
next test showed that it was now too yellow.
So I tried a subtle tint of aqua, but that proved to make the spot too
purple. And so it went. I never did get it perfect. You reach a point of diminishing returns. I got it “close enough” and abandoned it when
it just got too risky to try another change.
Then there was one matte that I had to paint in negative, if you can imagine that. It was for a Japanese cigarette commercial,
if I recall. This
was one of the ones that Gene would rave the most about, as if I were a miracle
worker, but really, it was just a methodical process, one step at a time. It’s all doable, if a lot more
challenging. Except for that wretched
spot in that QUATERMAIN scene. That one
seemed cursed.
Q:
Please give us a ‘picture’ of the blending process. How many tests would be required for example
until the elements would fit seamlessly.
How much adjustment to the painting might be needed to tie it all
together successfully.
KM: Sometimes we were just lucky and everything
came together in a remarkably few number of tests. Oddly, the matte camera shooting log book
(yellow binder) that Bruce kept has, sometimes, only a few entries for some
mattes, yet I have test clips for those same mattes showing numerous different
dates. So I don’t think we can count on
the log book to give us a true number for the lowest number of tests. Bruce might remember a number and even a
particular painting.
On the flip side, a few mattes required as
many as a dozen or more tests, as with THE TERMINATOR, particularly if a
director had second thoughts and wanted changes or a scene required animation
DX passes and/or cloud movement.
BB: When we were working on several paintings at
once, Ken could match the correct colors in two or three tests. He has an
amazing eye for color and I was astonished how quickly he could work. Sometimes we’d do our late night pick-ups for
three days in a row and then he’d tell me he had all of the color matching
done. Ken would go home for two weeks and practically finish the paintings
without any more testing. The original-negative method allows the painter to
blend over matte lines, double expose an area or back off any area of the
painting…something you can’t do when it’s an optical. We became extremely deft at understanding when
a hard or soft edge matte was needed.
Q:
Of course the maestro’s Peter Ellenshaw and Albert Whitlock were masters
of all facets of not just making a good matte, but knowing what will or will
not make a good matte. Whitlock would
never compromise the photographic quality of a shot to appease an over eager
director. I think there’s a lot to be said for the era when the matte painter
alone – such as Peter or Albert - had enormous control over the design,
photography and execution of a matte shot as opposed to the layers of VFX
Producers, VFX Supervisors, Coordinators or what have you who all want to have
a finger in the creative pie, with the actual painter and matte cameraman way,
way down the food chain, even on relatively small effects assignments with just
a handful of mattes.
KM: Typically I had a good amount of freedom to
create what I wanted in my mattes. Sure,
I did little concept sketches or mockups to show my ideas and get a director’s
feedback, but most of the time I was given the go-ahead with few to no
changes. Bruce would suggest more
adjustments than directors usually did.
There were a few who were fussy, analytical and wanted to be quite
involved, but then if I were paying the bill I would be, too. Sometimes a studio artist would do a concept
drawing that had been approved and I was to follow, which made things easy.
I don’t recall too many times when a director wanted me to change
something that I knew shouldn’t be changed.
The redness of the distant Kremlin was one such example. The phallic “silos” painting for SPACEHUNTER
originally had two moons in the scene, as rendered in Mike Minor’s approved
concept illustration, but late in the testing it was decided to remove them both. This was a challenge because of the
airbrushed sky, of course. I think I had
to repaint almost the whole sky.
To be continued...
The amazing work of Ken Marschall and Bruce Block will resume next issue where we'll take an in depth look at the trials and tribulations of painting mattes for James Cameron's TERMINATOR, creating historic vista's for ATTILA THE HUN, invisible period matte magic for the TINA TURNER biopic, stunning mattes of Area 51 for ROSWELL, the post apocalyptic world of CYBORG, and painting with an anamorphic eye for FRIGHT NIGHT 2 and more. Gene Warren jr of Fantasy II Visual Effects will speak with us on the long standing collaboration with Ken and Bruce on a number of films. In addition, we'll be taking a fascinating real life journey with Ken speaking to us enthusiastically about his experiences at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean visiting the world's grandest passenger liner.
Many of the matte paintings by Ken Marschall illustrated in this article, and in next month's continuation, are available for purchase. Contact: kenmarschallinc@aol.com Serious inquiries only, please. Ken's Titanic artwork can be seen at: www.KenMarschall.com and at www.TransAtlanticDesigns.com
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This blog is intended primarily as a tribute to the inventiveness and ingenuity of the craft of the matte painter during Hollywoods' Golden Era. Some of the shots will amaze in their grandeur and epic quality while others will surprise in their 'invisibility' to even the sophisticated viewer. I hope this collection will serve as an appreciation of the artform and both casual visitors and those with a specialist interest may benefit, enjoy and be amazed at skills largely unknown today.
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