The visual-effects library of Albert Whitlock and Illusion Arts, scanned from separation masters and VistaVision plates before the hand-painted matte process disappeared.
In his final years, Bill Taylor, ASC, co-owner of Illusion Arts and a governor of the Academy’s visual effects branch, set out to preserve the work he and matte painter Syd Dutton had built, along with the earlier output of the Universal Matte Department under Albert Whitlock. On the recommendation of his former matte cameraman Mark Sawicki, Taylor commissioned a test: a scan of the matte-painting demo reel from Mel Brooks’s “History of the World.” He was, in his own words, impressed and delighted.
The films had been stored in the Academy vaults and were in good physical condition, though earlier Whitlock work on Hitchcock classics like “Psycho” and “The Birds” had suffered dye fading. The collection documents the latent-image matte process, in which live action was exposed on part of the negative while the rest was masked off, then the same first-generation negative was returned to the studio to receive a matte painting, avoiding the quality loss of duplication. Finished shots and elements ranged across “The Wiz,” Martin Scorsese’s “Cape Fear,” “Coming to America,” “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” and “The Hindenburg,” for which Whitlock won the Academy Award for visual effects.
Illusion Arts worked in a wide range of emulsions and formats: high-gamma separation stocks, interpositives, low-contrast rear-projection prints, and original negatives, in 1.85, 1.33, and CinemaScope, plus VistaVision plates and composites. VistaVision is an eight-perforation format that runs the film horizontally to capture far more resolution than standard stocks, made famous by “The Ten Commandments” and later the effects work on “Star Wars.” Each format was profiled individually so every scan held its full tonal range.
The project preserved the finest of the traditional matte-painting process, right before the digital era replaced it.
The scans archived a photochemical craft that no longer exists in production, capturing the artistry of hand-painted mattes at first-generation quality. Future audiences and filmmakers can study the shots that defined an era of visual effects, long after the original elements are gone.
