Do You Recognize This Movie Matte Painting?

foreign [Music] everybody Adam Savage and I am down in La at Prop Store with Brandon allenger hello sir hey Adam uh and this is actually a first for us because we've covered so many aspects of film history on the channel and we've covered so many aspects of it here at Prop Store costumes and props and pieces and vehicles but one thing we have never covered is the art of the matte painting I can't believe you've never done mapping it's ridiculous how many videos we are how many dozens and dozens we've shot over the years no map painting they are such an important and amazing part of the filmmaking process uh and we've got three to talk about today tell me about this incredible one I mean so many people are recognizing this just looking at it this you can see it's the bat cave and it's from Batman return so the second Keaton film released in 1992 really probably at the tail end of the physical actual paint on glass or board matte painting era as opposed to the digital map paintings that I think came in later in the 90s but this is an honest to goodness old-fashioned paintbrush on the glass on glass I'm touching it it's glass on the back here yeah now tell me what shot this was used for so this is the interior of the bat cave and you can see a few dark spots where I think they matted in live action specifically I think the Batmobile was placed here um which you know when I first heard about this piece I was hoping the Batmobile was going to be painted into it right it's not they did the Batmobile as a a composited element yeah but you do have some of the Batcave apparatus the computers and such the bat computers down there that are included in the painting um and I love the staircase going up there it's yeah it's so there's a couple of things that really blow my mind about this is uh when this happens in the background of a shot you just take it in when you're watching a film you're like oh I understand I'm looking at the back of a large room one of the things that a matte painter does so well is not put too much detail in this is not photographic and when Joey Zooms in when you zoom in you'll be able to see just how I love how sort of rough hewn it is when you get close up right and if it's almost like if it was too sharp your eye would go to it instead of away from it and by leaving it a little bit more vague it Blends more naturally right and yeah we I think we do filling in of those details yeah right with our own with our own minds and that's it I think that an average person if asked to paint the background of a world if you're doing World building would be like I don't even know where to start and when I look at the close-up of this I realize that what the matte painters understand is that deep prioritization between the lines of gesture and its actual physical form like they are prioritizing for the gesture and we'll see this in a couple of the in the other two map paintings as well yeah it is not overpainted by any stretch of the imagination yeah but the the scale is big and that's really what map paintings is all about right it's it's an economical way to add value to a film where it's like instead of building a massive Batcave set we can build a small portion of it and we can paint the rest so classic Hollywood filmmaking technique going back decades on all the big epics and of course used very famously on like Star Wars it all comes back to Star Wars a lot of great map paintings in Star Wars um and oftentimes look at Batman Returns oftentimes in a matte painting especially painted on glass one of the things that would happen is they would actually clear a part they would actually leave open some part of this that they would film through the mat pain right to bring that action into the fork for an in-camera composite for in-camera Composites and our Star Wars mat has a little bit of that going on yes yeah um so tell me about that painter of this piece so this was done by a matte artist named Bill Mather it was done at a studio called mat World which was up in Northern California they did a lot of great mat work in the uh the 80s and the 90s Craig Baron and Chris Evans were some of the principals at Mat world I visited Matt world you were there a trip to San Francisco in 1989 and they were doing uh exterior model shots for dark man yeah all those cranes in the background behind the big villains office window they were doing the view outside the office window okay very cool yeah I mean sometimes with matte paintings the content is you know a little bit mundane because it's just extending a landscape or something like that one of the things I love about this it's the bat cave it's a freaking Batcave it speaks to Batman and what Batman is so yeah great great map painting love the size of it you know you're going to need some room to display this one but if you have a wall to put it up on it looks pretty cool and there's this is one of those few matte paintings in which you really don't have to guess too hard to know that's where it's from you're like this is this is It's the Batcave It could only ever be the Batcave it tells its own story yes yeah amazing piece now the bat cave did not have cutouts for background elements but this bit of the Death Star trench from Star Wars does yeah and this one's really interesting I mean we've sort of categorized it as a matte painting is it technically a matte painting I'm not sure it's almost it's almost a flat painting that's part of a three-dimensional model it's a force perspective it's this is this is what's viewed at the end of a large-scale trench shot yeah right yeah so basically they have the trench model in three dimensions like a big U something with buildings out here yeah and Something's Got a cap it at the end of it you know they they only had so much maybe they had 50 feet or something yeah how do they make it look like it goes on forever a force perspective flat painting at the end of it done by Joe Johnston done by Joe Johnston yes yeah there's actually photos of him painting this exact piece on the workbench so just for the uninitiated Joe Johnson isn't just the director of uh uh uh of The Rocketeer and a billion a million other amazing films he also uh designed and built Boba Fett's costume did some painting on the helmet was an amazing production designer in the Star Wars Universe uh was just an amazing all-around like umpteen triple threat right like he could paint he did a little draw he could storyboard design and direct uh I love the idea and this is continuing our theme of this looks like a lot of detail when you zoom in it is blocks of colors absolutely you can see they've actually started with some photographic elements like that right there is a black and white photo I don't know if the whole thing was black and white photo and then painted over right or if there's some photos composited potentially yeah but there are photographic elements underneath the paint and then um you've got some of the reflective tape so I'm trying to oh really oh oh yes right here like this the 3M Scotch light stuff that reflects back at the camera oh and and they use that to decorate the whole trench model and then some on the end of it as well so to get these little light kicks I never know just to give it some light yeah and you see it especially in the trench you don't really see it on the top surface of the Death Star but when they go down into the trench you do see quite a bit of that and did you say that there's like a picture of Joe Johnson actually painting this exact one yeah and they did they did three or four of them I guess because they didn't want it to seem like they were always in the same part of the trench right right I did three or four sort of slightly different you know different V cuts at the top different angles potentially yep yep um and so but this one's on his workbench he's got another one on the ground next to him and I think it's labeled on the back number two and this is not painted on glass this is painted on Masonite yep yeah this is bored so it's a little bit heartier a little bit easier to uh to preserve for the future and I assume similar to this black sheet that we have behind it here I assume they had some kind of piece of black something maybe just a paper with holes in it serving as that was their favorite way to do star Fields yeah yeah um I love how rough unit is again when you get up close and you realize that like honestly as prop replicators often make stuff so clean it doesn't have any resemblance to the original because no one would waste the amount of time that we are taking yeah to make stuff and this is just great I love seeing these photographic elements and like practically you can see the jigsaw marks of them cutting this out totally I also just love it tells the story of how much work goes into visual effects and how much work went into effects at that time it's like well not only do we need to build a three-dimensional trench model at some point somebody goes like well what's at the end of it and it's like yeah what is at the end of it and then you've got to plan that somebody's got to sit down and paint this it's just everything that winds up on screen had to be created physically in that era yeah and this kind of force perspective treatment has its roots in theater from hundreds and potentially thousands of years ago this is a totally wonderful and much used technique in theater oh like for painted backdrops or opening a door and seeing a room behind and creating the illusion of that makes sense I hadn't thought about that dude uh we have one more mad painting to go and this one is going to light the Millennials up [Music] all right Brandon every Millennial in the world is going to know what this is but tell me what it is this is from the summer of 1996 Independence Day this is the mothership this is the craft that uh Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith flew up in the the captured alien fighter and went in to plant the computer virus back when computer viruses were a big idea that took down all the alien ships in the network and saved the universe are you telling me that you don't watch this movie every July 4th I don't watch this movie I saw I saw a dependency when it came out and I've never watched it since and it's not because I think it's terrible it just didn't didn't land I think it's a very fun watchful movie it's a very defensive defensible love love Independence Day well I so I love this painting first of all I walked up and I thought it was on its side because this these look like the spiers of build it's funny you say that because when we photographed it it was photographed upright at first and then we had to go look at the movie and go no no it goes down on its side but however looking at these large antenna structures there is actually a lineage between the Independence Day spaceship and some of the classic ilm spaceships I'm thinking of the mothership from Close Encounters and the mothership from ET both have like this kind of extended antenna uh equipment structure going on totally they've sort of they're hearkening to that here I could see that even sort of nostromo-esque as well and I love how much work they're asking this map painting to do they're creating an entire environment was the shot composited that you actually see them go in here I think so yeah I don't know if you see them go all the way in I think you at least see them approaching it right maybe the ship is just on the kind of background here the right the more open background um you know sometimes with mad paintings it's fascinating to go look at the final compared to the actual artwork because frequently they don't use the whole artwork they only wind up using a small bit of it right and sometimes they composite in other elements so like beyond that model they might have had some other foreground element that was just giving it depth and perspective and such so sometimes it's actually hard to spot the map painting within the film but this one is in there specifically this exact shot it's it's on board it's another one on board and yeah yeah it's not it's on on Masonite or yeah someone's put the board on the frame oh actually look at this oh oh it's filled with fiber optics go here I got a flashlight can we uh oh yeah I've got the thing here here we go oh this is going to be cool there's a fiber optic trunk here let's see and I'm gonna light it up and do oh dude very cool look at that now I mean you might be asking yourself why wouldn't they just build a digital version again what date did this come out 96 96 there was not really computers doing this yes Jurassic Park came out before this but still very expensive process this is the old school technique this is how they knew how to do it look at that looks good like that we need to get a photo like that for the auction catalog you totally totally do I love that the fiber optics this is just embedded in Wood yeah coming back to a single trunk and they could put any color they want through here if someone was to display this in their home they could set it up with a little light set a little LED rig on the back and oh man nice light on the living room wall it I and again just like the other two map paintings we covered here when you get in close these big light bars are just it's like two brush Strokes of a couple of colors of white and light blue there's nothing that complex going on super simple yeah yeah this one I know was done by Chris Evans uh Chris Evans not Captain America not Captain America different Chris Evans uh he goes back to Industrial item magic he was a map painter on things like Return of the Jedi and he may have even done you know the very famous matte painting of all the Stormtroopers on the uh oh all lined up and there's one that supposedly has a smiley face hidden on his helmet you can't do work that tedious without adding a joke you got to that's great yeah he may have done that one so he did a lot of great mats at Island and then moving on to Matt world you know things like Willow and just other Big Island projects of the 80s yeah he's involved with well and this is this is about the most mature this technology got and I love the fact that this in the Batcave both painted at about the same scale this is painted at a scale in order to properly fill the camera frame with enough detail not too much yeah and for expense reasons but just enough detail to tell the story yeah no absolutely and um you know again this one being on board it's a little bit less delicate than a glass painting yeah easier to handle easier to preserve for the future um over the years do you get matte paintings frequently or are they a rare item actually they are pretty rare you know it's um I I think especially the glass ones right especially matte paintings of iconic moments that you can recognize that films must be pretty darn rare I mean unfortunately there's some sad stories about glass mat paintings that existed and then just got shattered in storage or in transit and that sort of thing we have had a couple of nice batches we did have some great map paintings from blade runner in the past I think we have one from Ghostbusters in this in this auction it's it's just some of the buildings that appear behind Stay Puff but yeah cool to have cool to have another matte painting um in in the prior auction we had one from the first Michael Keaton Batman which was like a Gotham City Painting yeah this time we have the bat cave so they don't come up that often especially from the big movies you know sometimes you see more obscure ones from commercials from television but to have multiple paintings from multiple big fan favorite titles it's uh it's an unusual offering for sure and it's a it's a this is one of those special effects technologies that feels more uh I guess accessible to me than most others it is really straightforward we need to expose an environment onto a camera we could make it full size we could make a model or we could paint it flat and then put some models in front and you're never going to notice the difference yes a little smoke maybe oh yeah literally smoking mirrors yeah it's worth noting we also have in this auction a couple of different scales of the attacker model so the actual model that they fly in we don't we don't have that size but we have a two foot and we have a four foot attacker model which I think are great ships great models that's amazing Brandon thank you so much for uh introducing us to this because it's such a cool technology and it yields such incredible results

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 184,141

Keywords: tested, matte painting, star wars, matte paintings, visual effects, behind the scenes, what is matte painting, batman, batman returns, independence day, id4, star wars matte painting, death star

Id: HrV759B7lHk

Length: 15min 45sec (945 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 19 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/trjnz]

Fantastic collection of quite famous paintings, and an even better discussion around their purpose and use including more general discussions around matte paintings.

Adam's excitement on any topic is infectious, and this video is no exception