Image from Art of the Hollywood Backdrop (Regan Arts) © 2016 by Richard M. Isackes and Karen L. Maness.
WHAT IS A MOVIE BACKDROP? (In
the Entertainment industry.)
Bruce Bisbey…please follow me at: https://dumbdogproductionsllc.blogspot.com or https://www.facebook.com/DumbDogProductionsLLC/ thank you.
WHAT IS A MOVIE BACKDROP?
Have you ever thought the background of a movie
looked like a picture? It might have been.
In almost every feature film of Hollywood’s golden
age, large-scale, meticulously rendered, hand-painted scenic backdrops transported
moviegoers to imagined lands. These remarkable paintings blended into the scene
unnoticed, convincing viewers that what they were seeing were absolutely real.
In an era of eye-popping VFX illusions, hand-painted
film backdrops, also known as backings, seem quaint to the point of cliché. Before
green screens, artists painted backdrops for some of Hollywood’s biggest hits… These
artists brought a unique intensity and fine-arts sensibility to the film
industry while painting colossal panoramas at record speeds in spite of
dangerous physical challenges. Amazingly, though, the paintings’ artists were
never credited on screen, and there has never been an award at the Academy
Awards to honor their achievement.
Despite the continued use of hand-painted backings in
today’s films — including big-budget movies Interstellar, Lemony Snicket’s A
Series of Unfortunate Events, and Hail Caesar!, among many others — digital
technology is beginning to supplant this art form, and many of the master
scenic artists are no longer working.
You can use a painted wall, quality green screen, or
paper backdrop. This creates a blank canvas that ensures the focus is on the
speaker and message. This is a great way to show mood and branding through
color (like your logo colors). Note that muted colors tend to work best,
though, as some colors can wash out the subject or be too distracting. You can
even try using textured backgrounds, like wood or brick, which are simple while
adding dimension.
One of the best references is:
THE ART OF THE HOLLYWOOD BACKDROP by Karen L. Maness
and Richard M. Isackes, out now from Regan Arts © 2016, is a visual compendium
of over 300 images highlighting this unheralded history.
From roughly 1860 to 1920 painted photography
backdrops were a standard feature of early photography studios. Generally of
rustic or quasi-classical design, but sometimes presenting a bourgeoisie
trompe-l'œil, they eventually fell out of fashion with the advent of the
Brownie and Kodak cameras which brought photography to the masses with
concurrent changes to public sensibility.
Theatrical scenery is that which is used as a setting
for a theatrical production. Scenery may be just about anything, from a single
chair to an elaborately re-created street, no matter how large or how small,
whether the item was custom-made or is the genuine item, appropriated for
theatrical use.
When backdrop painters were successful at their jobs,
the film going audience didn’t notice their work at all. Film-makers have
always used painted backdrops. The painted image often looks more realistic
than the photographic image. A matte painting is a step up, done on glass with
an area of blackness - the "matte", derived from the French word for
flat, dull paint - cut out so that it will not register on film; by a variety
of methods, the most sophisticated being optical printing, this painted world
is merged with models, real landscapes and actors to build the cinematic
illusion. In the 1960s and 70s a deeply fashionable, avant-garde manner of
painting known as Photorealism employed an air-brushed smoothness in an
apparently naive recreation of the visible world. Matte painters had been doing
something similar for decades.
The artist who created the painted world of The Birds
is Albert Whitlock, responsible for what my video copy boasts are "nearly
400 trick shots". Whitlock was a British-born matte painter and effects
specialist who had first worked with Hitchcock in Britain in the 1930s, on The
Man Who Knew Too Much and Sabotage. He is one of the most talented figures in
the history of matte painting and a central figure in the disaster films of the
70s. His ability to paint imaginary scenes of destruction with a glassy,
objective sheen made the delirious urban nightmare of the 1974 film Earthquake
possible. The last shot of a smoking, twisted, ruined American city is a
painting by Whitlock.
It's only when you see the original, surviving matte
paintings, framed as works of fine art, that you realize how old-fashioned, how
19th-century Hollywood is. Scenic artists can manipulate backings by adjusting
light, color, and texture, helping to support the movie camera’s constructed
image. Look at the works of Hollywood matte painters and you will see their
descent from Victorian popular painters such as John Martin, the true father of
the cinema of disaster, who painted realistic, detailed, large-scale visions of
the end of the world that filled Victorians with rapturous horror as they
witnessed trains plummeting from viaducts into a flaming void. Too some of the
most iconic settings like Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest and Munchkin
land in The Wizard of Oz.
The painted catastrophic landscapes of films such as
Earthquake, Planet of the Apes - the vision of the Statue of Liberty buried on
the shoreline that Charlton Heston stumbles on to at the film's climax is a
painting by Emil Kosa Jr - and the 1976 science-fiction film Logan's Run, for
which matte painter Matthew Yuricich created a hyperrealist vision of the
Lincoln memorial covered with weeds, are in a direct line from Victorian
painting. Whitlock, Yuricich and other matte painters owe far more too popular
Victorian art than they do to modernism. In fact, there is no modernism
whatsoever in Hollywood matte painting, by definition, because modernism
questions what is real, whereas the job of matte painting is to make us accept
fictional worlds without questioning them. Its roots can be traced directly
back to 19th-century academic painting, the kind of art that modernism
rejected; an art of super-naturalist historical and fantasy scenes, which made
the 19th-century artists Thomas Couture and Lord Leighton the Cecil B DeMille's
of their day.
If the apocalyptic visions of Albert Whitlock echo
those of John Martin, almost every other Victorian painting genre has cinematic
descendants. The use of matte painting in Roman epics has kept alive, as a kind
of secret tradition, naturalistic scenes of gladiators and assassinations in ancient
Rome by the great French academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. The cityscape of
ancient Rome that Peter Ellenshaw painted for Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus
(1960), with its brooding sky and photographically sharp ancient temples and
houses, might easily have been by Gérôme. Sci-fi matte painters create
intergalactic empires, space stations and death stars with the same meticulous
realism Victorian painters gave to desert landscapes and exotic cities. Matthew
Yuricich's painting for Forbidden Planet (1956) of a desert with purple trees
and green sky has the photographic sublimity of a Frederick Church painting of
the Hudson Valley.
Hollywood's vision of the Middle East hasn't got much
beyond Victorian orientalism, either. For Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)
Michael Pangrazio painted a bronze dawn vista of medieval Jerusalem, the kind
of vision of "the mysterious east" that is omnipresent in Victorian
art. In fact, report the authors of The Invisible Art, shooting on location in
Jerusalem "was out of the question, as Operation Desert Storm had just
begun". Through painting the film concocts an Arabian Nights vision
straight out of Victorian fantasy art that the real Middle East fails to
provide.
Today the craft of matte painting has been made
obsolete by the virtual paint box of digital cinema. But the aesthetic lives
on. The smooth, self-effacing appearance of matte paintings, which try to be as
real as photographs, is a look that anticipates and influences digital images.
Matte painting always aspired to the virtual. And the return of older kinds of
epic cinema that the digital age has made possible - most obviously with
Gladiator and the coming wave of ancient epics - means that the archaic,
19th-century tradition of history painting the matte painters kept alive is now
more potent than ever. If you want to find visual sources for Lord of the
Rings, check out some Victorian battle paintings and the medievalism of the
Pre-Raphaelites.
People often say painting died in the modern world,
that the age of mechanical reproduction made it a relic, of value only to
conservative fetishists of fine art. But the one place painting never died is
in the films that were supposed to have killed it.
Sources, References & Credits: Google, Wikipedia, Wikihow, WikiBooks,
Pinterest, IMDB, Linked In, Indie Wire, Film Making Stuff, Hiive, Film Daily, New
York Film Academy, The Balance, Careers Hub, The Numbers, Film Maker, TV Guide
Magazine, Blurb, Media Match, Quora, Creative Skill Set, Chron, Investopedia,
Variety, No Film School, How Stuff Works, WGA, BBC, Daily Variety, The Film
Agency, Best Sample Resume, How Stuff Works, Bright Hub, Career Trend,
Producer's Code of Credits, Truity, Production Hub, Producers Guild of America,
Film Connection, Variety, Wolf Crow, Get In Media, Production Beast, Sony
Pictures, Warner Bros, UCAS, Frankenbite, Realty 101, Liberty Me, Careers Hub, Sokanu,
Raindance, Film Connection, My Job Search, Prospects, David Mullich, Video
University, Oxford Dictionaries’, Boredom Therapy, The Bold Italic, Nicholas
Persac, The Guardian, Jones on art, Allison Meier,
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Image from Art of the Hollywood Backdrop (Regan Arts) © 2016 by Richard
M. Isackes and Karen L. Maness.
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