A Fun Look At The History of Hollywood’s Visual Trickery Processes

On November 28, 2016 - TV History


A Fun Look At The History of Hollywood’s Visual Trickery Processes

From 1898 till now, here is how special effects put the magic into movies like “The Invisible Man” ,”King Kong”, “Mary Poppins”, and more. From black and white matting, to yellow and blue screens, back to sodium vapor yellow and on to the green screens, we see the different processes and learn how each one worked. Enjoy! -Bobby Ellerbee

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8aoUXjSfsI

Go inside the history of the travelling mattes (now called chromakey) and learn the history of visual trickery used by filmmakers from the earliest filmmaker…

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5 Comments

  1. Don Newbury November 27, 2016

    These spots are fantastic. I’ve had so many questions answered. Thanks Bobby

  2. Dave Dillman November 27, 2016

    I was heavily into Chromakey before Ulitmatte. It was always a toss of the dice. I remember one disastrous production where we had to matte a large prop and several puppets. We were trying to use blue seamless paper, but it didn’t have enough saturation so we spent hours trying to get it to key. At one point I noticed in the wide shot that the reflection of the blue paper on the white tile floor was keying just fine. Frustration! We were shooting a special and the only time we could get was overnight after the 10 PM news, so the crew was getting more and more tired. As I remember we finally made the master shot smaller than we wanted and used a more reliable blue flat.

  3. Michael Hayne November 27, 2016

    cgi, like all effects, need to be complimentary to the story. I see too much of the other way around now. a necessary growth phase? I don’t know. but give me a solid story first and foremost.
    Thanks for this video.

  4. Tom Williamson November 27, 2016

    When I was at KTAB, we had constant problems with unstable “over the shoulder” box shots of the news anchors. I would have to re-adjust color phase several times during each newscast. This was around 1989.

  5. Charlie King November 27, 2016

    In the early 1960’s black and white television, in Amarillo, Texas, we were given the project of having our announcer leaning against a loaf of bread for a local bakery. He was dressed in pure white and the gain brought up on the image orthicon camera, and had him stay n that spot for a couple minutes. We then used the burn in on the camera as a matte, He got dressed in his suit then was positioned so he was inside the matte, and the bread on another camera, he did the spiel, with the only problem being he couldn’t move around. Worked really nice for that project.