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.)
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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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