Matte Paintings and Backdrops

The original matte paintings and backdrops are pretty cool. They have tons of character, and they connect Star Trek to a bygone era of pre-computer film making.

"The Cage"
1. Talos IV, rocky peaks against sky with storm clouds.
This is a big cyclorama, very effective. The sky is foreboding.
Re-used as Delta Vega in "Where No Man..."

2. Rigel VII, castle against sky with enormous moon.
This matte painting works incredibly well, including the scene with live-action Pike and Vina composited into it. It's an iconic image that really says Star Trek for a lot of people.
Re-used as Flint's house in "Requiem for Methuselah."

3. City of Mojave skyline with arch in foreground.
This is a backdrop. It was always a little hazy and hard to see in standard def, especially as syndication prints faded in the 1970s, and that gave it a mystique for me. I used to doodle it in high school, among many other things from ST and Lost in Space. I was pretty bored.
Re-used as Planet Q in "The Conscience of the King."

"Where No Man Has Gone Before"
4. Lithium cracking station on Delta Vega (matte painting).
The industrial fuel bins are pretty cool; the office building in the foreground is some amazingly ugly architecture. Like world-class ugly. It reminds me of the gas company plant where my father worked when I was a boy.
Re-used (altered) as Tantalus Colony in "Dagger of the Mind."

"Court Martial"
5. Starbase 11 colony.
This painting was done on glass and lit from behind. It's gorgeous, but the main tower has windows so large that they make the tower seem like it must be a small structure, which would make the adjacent buildings much too small. Still pretty cool when not under long scrutiny. To my eye it looks vastly better and more convincing than similar "planet surface" paintings that were seen years later on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

"The Menagerie" Part 1
6. Starbase 11 city.
Matte painting composited with a small live-action set. With its sidewalk receding into the background and an abstract sculpture in the foreground set (not part of the painting), the overall scene is very reminiscent of a particular 1960s photo of TRW Space Park, where "Operation: Annihilate!" would later go on location.

"A Taste of Armageddon"
7. Eminiar VII capital city.
This matte painting is composited with the same live-action set from "The Menagerie," but the sculpture is swapped out for a different one. In the 1970s, before I had any off-air references in hand, I used to think 6 and 7 were the same exact painting; faulty memory on my part.
Re-used as Scalos city in "Wink of an Eye." Pretty effective there if, by chance, the Scalosians were supposed to be standing in front of a mural.

"The Devil in the Dark"
8. Janus VI mining operation.
This painting sets the scene for a mining planet, but for me it doesn't quite come alive.
Re-used as underground in "The Gamesters of Triskelion."

 

Not sure exactly what the topic is here.

My favorites of the lot mentioned there are:
Rigel VII
Delta Vega
Starbase 11 ("Court Martial")

 

It's about commenting on some works of art. Is that allowed?

 

If that's what it's about, sure. They're beautiful, IMO especially the ones I picked.

 

Yeah, I loved the TOS matte paintngs. But I gotta say, I liked the Buck Rogers paintings very much also.

TNG had some good ones also.

--Alex

 

Have you seen the latest additions from "Bird of the Galaxy"?

For the first time ever, Eminiar VII full painting:




Alternative painting, not used, for Starbase 11:




I love these! Someday I'd like to do a mini-website dedicated to TOS matte paintings and backdrops with paintings, screengrabs and unused versions.

Best,
Maab

 

This is a common pitfall of all VFX, whether model or painting. (And today, "matte paintings" fill a much more complex category known as "scene extension.") The engineering of the future may well produce buildings so tall and spindly, or windows so "impossibly" large, or starships so amazingly smooth that they appear as toys to our eyes.

And so the visions of the future must be sullied by nurnies (were the models of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY the first high-profile use?), smaller window panes, and surface textures to give our eyes some cue for scale. The Apollo astronauts described the odd nature of the lunar landscape—distant mountains appeared sharp and undiffused by atmospheric distance, and the horizon had a curiously foreshortened look.

Given time, we will eventually witness fantastic new engineering, say a ravine-crossing, spindly bridge made of Rearden metal, that just does not look real... until we walk up and touch it. Even then, it might not look quite right.

 

I just love all the stuff "Bird of the Galaxy" is sharing with us.

I remember seeing the larger Eminiar VII matte painting in Asherman's ST Compendium and, IIRC, in The Art of Star Trek, BUT...

Unless I'm mistaken the entire part on the right side of the right column is an area that has not been published previously.

Bob

 

The matte paintings were all by Albert Whitlock, weren't they?

Do we know who painted the cycloramas/set backdrops?

 

Christopher beat me to it, as I was going to mention Whitlock's contributions.

That expansion upon Eminiar VII, that is just mind blowing! I never even knew there was more to it, let alone seeing it! In theory, they could have used either "edge" in other episodes to establish different population centers.

I think I bruised my jaw when it dropped to the floor!

Sincerely,

Bill

 

Does the image shown on the briefing room screen in "The Cage" count as a matte painting?

http://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/0x00/thecage180.jpg

 

No, it doesn't.

It's only a matte when it is added via a matte technique.

This is just a piece of art rear projected onto a screen.

On-set painted extensions, translights and cycloramas are also not mattes.

 

I don't think its so much the windows are large, the building actually is small. Look at the first floor window and the apparent size of the person inside. Plus it looks like each floor is a single room.

 

Right. "Matte" means "mask." A matte painting is a painting that masks out part of a live-action image in order to substitute a different image. The earliest matte paintings were glass paintings placed between the camera and the set/location in order to create an in-camera composite during filming (Gone With the Wind used a bunch of these, I think). By the time of TOS and the ILM era, matte paintings generally had holes through which live-action film was rear-projected.

As for that image on the monitor in that "Cage" screenshot, is that even a painting? It might be a retouched photo.

 

One problem, I think, in interpreting the scale of the main building in that painting is that the two towers to the left of it bear more than a striking resemblance to the iconic observation towers in the New York Pavilion of the 1964 New York World's Fair. The observation towers are much larger than the two towers in the Starbase 11 painting could be, if each window corresponds to one story (storey) in the main building. The resemblance of the starbase towers to the observation towers may create an expectation of what the scale should be that the main building contradicts.

 

Well, whatever the proper definition of the image projected onto the briefing room screen, I know I would enjoy seeing a sharper resolution version...if it exists.

Sincerely,

Bill

 

I always loved the matte paintings and such. They looked far better than the CGI backdrops of stuff like Voyager and Enterprise.

 

As to the image projected on the screen in "The Cage", it appears to a photo collage. It's basically this unused image (link) without the Pleiades, and flopped.

Indeed, Gone With the Wind was arguably the first real big showcase of matte paintings, having reportedly anywhere up to 100 mattes of one form or another. Many of those were indeed mattes, not glass shots. (Just to clarify, by "glass shot" I mean a painting on glass shot in set. Many matte paintings are painted on glass and sometimes confusingly referred to as glass shots even when used with a matte process.)

For thems what's interested, glass paintings and hanging miniatures were widely used instead of matte paintings in part because they were more reliable than compositing. You got the shot "in-camera" with no jitter, matte edges or generational loss. The limitations were that you had to execute the paintings and models prior to photography and thus you were locked into the decisions you'd made early on. You couldn't change your mind about the angle or height of the camera. Matte paintings don't have as many restrictions because they're done in post.

There were some really sophisticated optical techniques in use even before sound. Murnau's 1927 silent feature Sunrise has some really amazing VFX work (link to a blog post about it), some of which you don't even notice because it's so convincingly pulled off.

One example: in early days the Schüfftan process (link) was also widely used as a method for combining miniatures with live action. Metropolis is chock full of Schüfftan process shots.

While rear projection into paintings is a technique which was exploited by a number of films, the matte composite remained in use right up to the end of the optical era.

If anyone wants an education in matte paintings and related arts they could do a lot worse than reading the blog Matte Shot - a tribute to Golden Era special fx (link).

 

Well, those are still matte paintings, just done using digital painting programs instead of canvas and pigments. They're still usually 2-dimensional artworks created by individual artists, just using more versatile tools. I suppose that in recent years it's become more common to use 3D digital environments, but there are still a fair number of 2D paintings used for backgrounds, even if they're sometimes mapped onto 3D wireframes to give them depth.

As much as I love the Whitlock paintings from TOS, I also love most of the digital matte paintings done for TOS Remastered to replace the recycled shots in later episodes. Max Gabl's painting of Flint's mansion is really gorgeous and makes more sense than the reuse of the Rigel fortress.

 

Thanks, Maurice! Both for the larger resolution of the projected screen image and the links to the essays.

Sincerely,

Bill