![]() ![]() Bryan Langley and his assistant Reg Johnson were also in demand when it cane to shooting and assembling optical composites, with Langley having a very long career, largely at Pinewood. Other important names in the application of optical printing and composite photography in the UK were George Gunn and Doug Hague who did miraculous work on some of the Powell & Pressburger ballet pictures. RKO's Lloyd Knechtel, Linwood Dunn and Cecil Love would further refine optical printing processes to a point where renowned film maker and actor Orson Welles once stated that "The optical printer is the best train set a boy could ever play with" (I think that's the quote, or something near to it).Įffects industry luminaries such as Irving Ries, Paul Lerpae, Roswell Hoffman, Hans Koenekamp, Donald Glouner, Robert Hoag, Bill Taylor and Clarence Slifer are discussed and their work illustrated.Īcross the Atlantic in England optical printing and travelling matte technology was developing and being refined by leading industry figures such as Vic Margutti at Rank Studios, especially with the yellow backing sodium vapour system where much refinement in pulling mattes from previously problematic artifacts such as water, fine hair and reflective surfaces could be put into practice with excellent results. Improvements and adaptations of the processes would see cleaner finished composites over time, though not without a number of additional photographic steps being required. The Williams as well as the Dunning methods were somewhat limited in range but at a time when rear process projection wasn't feasible the competing travelling matting techniques were readily sought after by studios throughout the 1920's and far into the 1930's. Cinematographers such as Paul Eagler, Louis Tolhurst, Frank Booth and Norman Dawn made important inroads into photographic trick shot processes, with key figures such as Frank Williams and Carroll Dunning, individually of each other, making such significant developments in composite optical cinematography that the principle of the technique - in particular the Williams technique - would prove a vital special effect staple for years to follow. American pioneers such as Edwin S.Porter produced some of the first known in camera split screen composite shots as far back as 1903 on THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY. Early exponents in motion picture camera wizardry were European pioneers such as Frenchman Georges Melies and the German cinematographer Guido Seeber where audiences in the early 20th Century were treated to scenes involving multiple exposed superimpositions amid fanciful narratives. ![]() Very early experiments consisted of simple double exposures - a hold over from still photography techniques for several decades from around the mid 1850's or so. Optical tinkering trick work in motion pictures has been going on in some form or another probably as long as the medium has been around, certainly as early as the 1910's. Pioneering travelling matte exponent Frank Williams In today's cinema, where relentless, hyper-kinetic and often pointless IMAX scaled visuals are demanded as an absolute prerequisite by both the film maker and the target audience, weaned on mind numbing music videos and X-Box, it's such a pleasure to actually engage with the trick shots of old, before a time of Apple Mac's, Silicon Graphics workstations and binary data, where the creation of the typical optical effect was often a long and complicated 'hands on' as well as 'eyes on' procedure requiring often multiple rolls of film, special lighting and filtration 'recipes', line ups requiring endless patience and skill, highly sensitive film processing, endless wedge tests and, most importantly, necessitating precision built specialist photographic tools and optics that only a select few could operate and successfully bring all of the elements together in as clean a union as possible with the technology available for any given shot. In a slight departure from my standard matte painting survey, we'll be taking a long overdue and thoroughly deserved look into the world of traditional photo-chemical optical effects, with a somewhat staggering array of great imagery from a century of optical printer wizardry in addition to profiles on a number of the key exponents from the under appreciated and mostly closeted away world of The Optical Printer. I've been away in Japan for the past three weeks or so for a wedding and some first rate tourism, though whilst in foreign lands I've had today's blog post in mind.
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