how did trumbull & dykstra create the mattes for TMP?
- Thread starter Borjis
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I can answer that.
For the most part, they did what are called hi-con mattes...high contrast. What this means is that you shoot the model against a black background for all the various elements, then you replace the black-background with a big backlit white background and don't light the model, yielding a black silhouette on a white background. Reflections, especially from the shiny Enterprise, made pulling perfect mattes difficult, but they eventually figured out a technique that worked: sandwiching the backlit matte with a negative front-lit matte to help fill in spill areas.
P.S. This should be under Trek Movies, methinks.
Yeah, I'll move now
Pre-CGI special effects were so cool. It took so much ingenuity to figure out how to do them, and there were so many different, imaginative techniques. That hi-con matte technique sounds very clever. I guess it's more complex than bluescreen, though, since you need to make more passes to get the complementary mattes rather than creating them optically.
It is sad that CGI has taken some of the wonder out of effects magic. A beautiful special effect used to make people say "Wow! I wonder how they did that!"
Now a beautiful special effect makes people say "Wow! They can sure do a lot with computers!"
To me, the real wonder was in finding out how they did it, and seeing the ingenuity that so often went into it. Like how they used a sort of giant nylon stocking to create the tornado in The Wizard of Oz, or how the imploding house at the end of Poltergeist was actually done with a super-powered vacuum cleaner sucking a prescored miniature in on itself, with a high-speed camera capturing the split-second event and slowing it down. To me, knowing that is a lot more interesting than the finished shot itself (or the movie it was in).
Of course, there's still a lot of artistry in FX work. It's become like animation, an artist's medium that requires skill, talent, and hard work to do well. But it doesn't have the same kind of cool problem-solving element it used to have, the same cutting-edge quality of having to invent whole new ways of creating images. (Well, usually. There are still pockets of innovation, like the amazing facial-animation technique used for the puppets in Tim Burton's Corpse Bride.)
And to some extent, it doesn't have the same variety of techniques. A lot of filmmakers still do use miniatures, animatronics, makeup, and live effects when feasible, though some techniques like glass-painted mattes, front projection, optical bluescreening, etc. have fallen by the wayside. And too many filmmakers are too quick to resort to CGI even when conventional techniques would produce better results (I'm looking at you, Stephen Sommers). And even worse, too many people in the general public have come to think of CGI as synonymous with special effects and are unaware that those other techniques are still being used at all.
Even if you do know, or can figure out after seeing it, how an effect is done a creative or artistic or surprising use of an effect packs an enormous effect.
This is part of why I'm so fond of silent movies --- they weren't short on special effects, and it's so stunning to see, to pull an example from His Majesty, The Scarecrow of Oz, the Tin Man use his axe to chop off the witch Mombi's head, only to have Mombi lean down, pick it up, and put it back on her head, and walk off again.
You could do this easily with computer effects. You could do this so easily that it would have no spectacle, no amazement. For a movie made in 1914 and when they had to do it with no effect more elaborate than stopping the camera it's still stunning to see.
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