matte painting. P1

Matte painting is where a artist will paint a 2 dimensional picture, and the picture will be filmed behind several 3 dimensional elements to give it depth. Its a alternative to the green screen although this method does not need extra editing after filming the raw footage because the background is filmed and not put in at the editing stages.

How did matte painting develop?
Matte painting started off by artists using paints or pastels on a big glass screen so it could be put into live footage. Big scenes could not be created by props or scenery.
In 1907 Norman Dawn developed the technique so he could combine a photograph and painting to improve the environment taken by the camera. Films in the 1900's have been using Matte painting before green screening there was no Chroma keying software about, so being able to film a scene or shot with the background already painted in was the main option for many film producers.

3 examples.

A well known matte painted movie scene was the tractor beam sucking in the rebel ship into the empire's star destroyer in the first star wars.

in the mid 80's computer generating graphics allowed matte painters to work digitally on computers.
Chris Evans in 1985 for Sherlock Holmes made a painting for a scene featuring computer generated animation, it was a animation of a night jumping through a stained glass window.

In 1990 Die Hard: die harder was the first film to use digitally composed live-action footage with a traditional glass matte painting which had been photographed and scanned into a computer,
 it was the last scene which took place on a airport runway.