The Invisible Art: The Legends of Movie Matte Painting [With CDROM]

""The beauty of a matte shot is that you can become God,"" Alfred Hitchcock said, and it's a fitting epigram to this remarkable study of a little-known facet of Hollywood illusion-the art of painting background scenery on glass. Captured by the camera and merged with live action, a distant galaxy, a lost empire or an impossible landscape can look undeniably real. And yet, among all the masters of filmic art's smoke and mirrors-the fashioners of masks and prosthetic limbs, the pyrotechnic wizards behind giant, slow motion explosions-matte painters remain some of the least appreciated artisans. (It is, note the authors, their very genius that keeps them ""unsung"": audiences often don't even know that what they're seeing isn't real.) This book represents the first sustained look at the art and technology of matte painting. Featuring over 400 images, plus interviews with many of the greatest matte painters themselves, it tells a story of wildly inventive artifice and myriad man-hours, offering a peek inside a guild of genuine movie magicians. As a feast of technical information and an alternative history of movies themselves, from their frontier days to the global system as it exists today, this book is a labor of both love and intelligence.