The title says it all. We went to see Shrek the Third this Memorial Day Weekend, and I was startled to see a credit for “Chief Matte Painter” (We’re all avid credit-watchers, especially with flicks like this, where they stash little extras in the credits. Be forewarned – there aren’t any after the first five minutes here)
Then I was surprised to see a whole section on matte painting credits a little later.
I loves me a good matte painting – Albert Whitlock is a God. (I’m glad Mel Brooks gave him a speaking role in History of the World, Part I). Peter Ellenshaw is a legend.
But…Shrek? It’s all digital! Nobody’s compositing anything in classing “glass painting” mode, like they did from The Lost World all the way up through the 1980s. ven if somebody does a painting and it gets scanned in to be used as a background, that seems totally unlike classic Matte Painting, and shouldn’t be described with the same terms (how is it, then, different from what they used to call Backgrounds in the old cartoons? They never called those “Matte Paintings”!)
So what’s up with the use of this live-action terminology in a digital movie? It sems to make as much sense as saying “Shrek’s Wardrobe by Botany 500”.
It’s an useful term which makes it clear for all parties what has happened: “We didn’t have the time or budget to create the real thing, so someone drew us a pretty picture of it and we used that instead.” (“The real thing” in this case being a totally 3d model of whatever, if they only need one 2d view of it.)
There’s plenty of terms that are severely anarchronistic, but are still in use because everyone knows what is meant. When was the last time you heard a phone ring? Most make beep noises or have wacky ringtones these days.
But that’s the point – I don’t know what’s meant. In a digital movie, “matte painting” seems pretty meaningless. Why not just call it “background” nd be done with it?
Now if the characters were animated against real photography (as was the case with some Disney film about a family of dinosaurs, I believe) then you could have matte paintings as part of the background plate, but I think the “Shrek” films are 100% digital, so the use of “Matte Paintings” is confusing to me too.
Apparently matte painting is still an entirely valid and useful term in digital cinematography etc.
It might have changed a bit in the transition from live footage to 3d rendering, but I don’t see why the term would become obsolete - lots of stuff that happens in a real-life production is mirrored in a computer-generated one - there’s still a ‘camera’ and there are still camera operators, there are ‘lights’ and there are still lighting engineers/key grip/etc, there are still sets, costumes, and so on - they just don’t have hard physical reality, but they still need someone to make them work.
Mangetout’s link doesn’t have anything to say about matte painting with regards to movies that ought to be completely CGI. I don’t doubt that there are things to be done that mimic stuff in the “real world”, but we DON’T have CGI “Lighting technicians” or CGI “key grips” or CGI “Continuity” people. All those things are handled in an entirely different way in CGI, and this is reflected in the way the titles of the people doing the work are different, too.
“Matte Paintings” are used to take the place of building a large and complex set in real life. With Matte Paintings, Hitchcock shot down from the top of the UN Building in North by Northwest. Lon Chaney ran past the Cathedral of Notre Dame in The Hunchbxck of ND. And so on and so on.
Shrek is, basically, a cartoon. There’s no real people to shoot with an artificial background. You don’t frame the Real-Life action with a glass painting, because there’s no real-life action.
So why would one even NEED and Matte Painting? You’d think that most of the backgrounds would already be stored as digital scenes in the computer.
But let’s say they aren’t. Say they “cheat”, and somebody paints a background in the old-fashioned way, and it gets scanned in, and used in the rest of the feature. How is this different from what all those animators at Warner Brothers and Disney used to do, and called “Backgrounds”? Calling it “Matte painting” seems inappropriate. Is it a Status thing? – “Backgrounds are for cartoons, and this is more hotorealistic, so the artists deserve “matte painting” credit”?