The evolution of the movie backdrop

When I look at movies from the ’20s to the ’90s, I’m blown away by the worlds that filmmakers were able to create with their visuals. From Mary Poppins to Ben-Hur to Star Wars, they truly made things that people had never seen before — all with little to no help from computers.

How did they pull off such striking and novel visuals? Well, often, it was just with a paintbrush and some glass.

With a technique called matte painting, skilled artists would paint a scene and black out a portion of the frame for live-action photography. The actors would be filmed on footage that blacked out the painted backdrop, and then filmmakers would combine the two exposures to make one seamless scene.

This, of course, all changed once computers entered the industry. By the late 1990s, matte paintings were almost entirely digital. Just a few decades later and now they’re almost all made in 3D.

With the development of AI, a new evolution might be on the horizon. Tune in to Vox’s latest to find out how AI might soon change the matte painting industry — again.