Blood on the Floor
But even while Matte World began producing traditional original- negative paintings for such films as Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Batman Returns (1992), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), ILM was leading deeper forays into the frontier of the digital realm. ILMer Chris Evans, who later became a key artist at Matte World, had already had a hand in history, producing the first matte painting in the digital realm?a magical stained-glass effect for Young Sherlock Holmes (1985).
By the early nineties, Matte World and Illusion Arts were still wary of "digital" matte painting. In a 1992 article for "American Cinematographer," Barron wrote, "Early tests have produced mixed results, and the high-tech composites have so far resulted in somewhat degraded images?the kind of degraded images that the best matte painters have found unacceptable."
In 1992, Matte World showcased the playbook of traditional techniques on Tim Burton's Batman Returns. For a classic shot of millionaire Bruce Wayne being summoned via the Bat-signal to assume his secret identity as Gotham City's masked crime fighter, the company created a completely in-camera effect using a physical miniature of the Wayne mansion and a wintry landscape dressed with baking soda for snow, a painted night background, and Bat-signal artwork projected onto fiberfill clouds. For another Bat-signal shot, the company used a skyscraper painting, a projected signal, and sculpted clouds affixed to glass on a motion-control mover to provide realistic movement. In a shot of Cobblepot Mansion, birthplace of the film's villainous Penguin, Matte World produced an illusion of depth and scale by filming the mansion gate and house on separate motion control tracks, and added a rear projection of a dark figure in a mansion window. Artist Bill Mather also produced a classic glass-painted scene of the Gotham City skyline, complete with a rooftop shaped like Batman's famous bat-eared cowl.
But 1992 was the year Matte World acknowledged the future was fast approaching?the company changed its name to Matte World Digital. By then, Barron had also assumed sole ownership of the business.
The transition to digital technology came with shocking suddenness throughout the visual-effects industry. Changes expected to arrive over the course of years, happened within months. Hardest hit was the photochemical art of optical compositing, which was replaced by digital compositing. Matte painters had to put their brushes, oils, and glass canvases away, and adapt to computer hardware and software paint programs. Instead of a solitary and traditionally secret craft, where each artist was master of their shot, a matte effect now required technical directors and new layers and lines of command. Some couldn't make the transition. Like all revolutions, there was "a lot of blood on the floor," as the saying went during this tumultuous period.
But many matte painters acknowledged there were advantages in the digital realm. For one, they didn't have to worry about dropping the heavy glass canvases. The computer technology was also opening up new creative possibilities. "The computer is?so much faster, you can scan in photographs of a cloud and click it off if you don't like it," Caroleen Green, a veteran of ILM and MWD explained in The Invisible Art. "You can do hundreds of layers to make that perfect cloud, whereas in traditional painting if I were painting a slide [projection] of a cloud and ruined the gradation I'd have to start all over again."
Matte World Digital's last traditional matte painting was the Carpathia rescue ship rendered by Chris Evans for the 1997 epic Titanic. The painted rescue ship was an element in a final image that included live action of water, lifeboats, and smoke for the rescue ship's smokestack, CG icebergs, and a digitally painted dawn sky.
MWD carried on with the same philosophy it had begun with, an approach summed up in a 2009 in-studio publication: "Regardless of the technological changes, the challenge for creating a Matte World Digital visual effects shot remains the same as it was twenty years ago?make it look real and make it seamless."
The Digital Realm
Matte World Digital not only transitioned to digital 2D and 3D effects, it brought its own innovations to its work. For Martin Scorsese's Casino (1995), the company helped recreate the Las Vegas Strip, circa the 1970s, including the neon-lit dome of the Tangiers' casino. The multitude of shimmering lights was realized with the first-ever use of "radiosity" software, which emulated the true nature and dynamic range of light on the environment, including bounce light and ambient gradations.
Barron took particular pride in the company's back-to-back projects for director David Fincher. For Zodiac (2007), based on the serial killer who terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s, MWD recreated the San Francisco of the period, including the city's Embarcadero Freeway, which had since been torn down. To show the rising of the Transamerica Pyramid building that was then under construction, MWD employed a time lapse effect and CG lighting techniques.
But in 2008, the year of MWD's twentieth anniversary, came the work that was, arguably, the company's greatest achievement: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The challenge included creating digital matte paintings showing the degradation over time of a New Orleans train station, for which MWD employed Next Limit's Maxwell rendering software?an architectural visualization tool?revamping it to include real-world lighting effects. For New Orleans city scenes from eighty years past, MWD invisibly added period buildings to replace modern structures. For an establishing shot of New York City in the Thirties, the company created a 3D period cityscape that allowed for full movement of the virtual camera and added smoke, moving cars, and the ambient play of light. When the director asked for a low-altitude helicopter shot over Paris, reference photos from a higher helicopter shoot was worked out using a flight simulator, and a high-resolution CG model was created for a completely virtual aerial fly-over.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button won Craig Barron an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Oscar for Best Visual Effects, and he received a similar honor from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA).
Hugo and The Last Days
After the company's acclaimed work on Benjamin Button, there were other major projects, including Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010), and Joe Johnston's Captain America: The First Avenger (2011). But another revolution was underway, and there would be more blood on the floor. In addition to rising costs of technology and R&D, studio cost-saving measures and competition from an increasingly global effects industry was making it difficult for a small company to survive. (Such pressures had already claimed companies like Orphanage, Illusion Arts and Asylum.)
In August of 2012, the very month Matte World Digital closed, Digital Domain CEO John Textor gave a talk at the annual SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in which he questioned whether the visual effects industry could survive in the United States.
Matte World Digital's last major feature was Martin Scorsese's Hugo, the 2011 release based on The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the illustrated novel by Brian Selznick. The story, set in Paris during the 1930s, featured Georges Méliès, the former stage magician who pioneered movie magic but was now forgotten, eking out a living selling toys at a souvenir stand in a Paris train station. Ironically, Barron once sought out effects artist Larry Butler, who had not only met Méliès, but escorted him around London at the request of producer Alexander Korda, who was helping bring the cinematic illusionist back to public attention, the very true-life scenario explored in the novel and Scorsese's adaptation. Barron would recall his delight in shaking Larry Butler's hand, thereby shaking the hand of the man who shook the hand of Georges Méliès.
"Hugo was a wonderful experience, a chance to work for Marty again and to create with visual effects the Paris of the 1930s, as well as Georges Méliès' famous studio made of glass," Barron reflected. "Hugo represented the culmination of the Matte World Digital aesthetic of creating historic CGI environments that look realistic and tell a great story. The film is also poignant in its portrayal of the father of visual effects and narrative film technique, who is depicted as closing his studio at the end of the film. And while I certainly do not see myself as a Georges Méliès, I do understand that through no fault of your own, the industry you love can last longer than the business you created."
The closing of Matte World Digital brought an outpouring of emails and Internet postings from colleagues, friends, and former employees. In an email passing along the latest unsolicited reaction from a former employee, Barron concluded, "I suppose we have to say Matte World Digital failed to go on?but what a beautiful failure we had."
As matte painter Matthew Yuricich, who passed away in May of 2012, once lamented, "All good things come to an end."
Barron took solace and strength from the memory of those he had worked with during a nearly quarter century in business. "They were a dedicated band of underdogs. Often flying by the seat of their pants, but I knew the crew could do anything. The word 'impossible' did not exist at Matte World Digital, and I had the honor to lead them."
This site will remain on the Internet as a Matte World Digital archive. Visit the home page or film credits to see more than two decades of visual-effects work, from glass mattes to the digital age.
