Few days ago I found the book which attached my attention as much that I bought it (I wanted to have it, not only borrowed from library. Practitional advice, lately I buy book on amazon, it is amost always 1/3-1/2 street price)
Development of 2D and 3D programs needed for visualizing my ideas were held in big part by cinema special effects industry.
In the middle of eighties John Knoll who was working for leading special effect company ILM(Industrial Light & Magic) decided to create a program which would be available to the average consumer. Before on market you could find only high-end extremely expensive programs used mostly by the biggest publishing and special effects companies (Time magazine and ILM).
So Photoshop was introduced, first tested at movies like “Terminator” in 1991 and soon after available on consumer market.
I started working with this program in 1994 so not too long after it was on market.
It only about 15 years when Photoshop program in on market but it was revolutionary time especially for publishing and special effects and movie industry.
For almost 100 years many special effects were based on work of artists called matte painters. The visions of past- Ancient Rome (from 1960 “Spartacus” movie), the enormous size creature reaching top of Empire State Building- 1933 “King Kong”, the famous burn of Atlanta from 1939″Gone with the wind” and much later in 1982 “Blade Runner” were created by imagination of those relatively small group of people.
Matte painters works similar way till beginning of nineties – painting on canvas and glass which by different techniques were combined with real sets with actors. Of course it was somehow easier to erase the border between painting and photographic image when the resolution of image wasn’t to high and image was moving. But still the process was so complicated that till the end of 20 century was kept as top secret by production houses. It was only in 2002 when first complete book about matte paintings was published (“The invisible art. The legends of movie matte painting”).
I mentioned those movies, which probably most of people in their time had seen, but did they ever heard who created those touching and strong images of past and future?
Right now situation is even worse especially when for special effects are involved sometimes hundreds of people ( 1994 “Titanic” movie) and creating 3D objects is much more time consuming especially that audience is expecting hyper-realistic visions.
Matte painting
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