In describing the methods used by the matte artists at ILM, Pangrazio said that the paintings were done on glass or masonite, depending on their use. "Sometimes, for those very long pans and tilts, we use a 4X8 foot sheet of masonite. For most shots, however, we use a 2 and one half by six foot pane of glass mounted in an aluminum frame. We like to use acrylics as an undercoat when laying in the painting. We can make our wedge tests on that, or we'll put it together with a plate of the background element, and we can get those back every day. When we get it to a fine enough point that we're satisfied with it, we'll usually glaze over the acrylic underpainting with oils, because oils tend to have truer and more saturated colors. We use front projection with a lot of these composites, and we've learned that with front projection, which has to be shot through a beam splitter, some of the colors just aren't as vivid as they should be. So, we try to hype up the colors.
"The reason we use the acrylics is that they're very fast and easy to lay in and we can get it back with projector and see if the perspective is right, if the lighting looks okay, and if we like the ideas. We can change them ever day very quickly with acrylics, then we can go over them later to finish the painting."
The larger paintings on masonite are necessary for scenes with extensive camera movement. Live action portions often are introduced into the paintings by rear projection. Cutouts in the painting ordinarily are used to accommodate the projected element, but a new method was tried successfully for Jedi. "What we've done that we hadn't tried before is to do the whole painting in full color and paint the area that the projection goes into in black. Then we make a black matte around those areas to hold out the painting and do the rear projection on a second pass. That way we don't have to cut through the masonite. We get nicer, finer edges than we can cut through a one-quarter inch piece of material."
The realism demanded of the matte artist is as important in the convincing portrayal of fantasy as it is with more mundane subjects, according to Pangrazio. "It really takes a lot of effort to do a matte painting. It's not just sitting down and painting. A lot of research goes into it as well as input from others. They're being very particular about this show when it comes to continuity, and if we have a space ship facing this way in one shot and the next shot is a down shot, we have to have the prongs on that ship still in the frame so that there is a continuity to it.
"We have our own little library as well as Lucasfilm's library, and we're constantly looking for a photo that will help us to convey the reality of the shot. We always have a problem in trying to fill in what we have to do with our imaginations. Every time we do that it doesn't turn out as well as when we have some solid reference materials. If we don't have anything, we'll make a little miniature and shoot it with a Polaroid camera so we can get the perspective. Sometimes we have to paint in space ships on large master shots. There is one big tilt down shot with a dozen or so rebel ships on a huge docking bay. To get all the perspectives right on everything we had to build miniatures, light the whole thing, and shoot polaroids."
The ILM artists produce their paintings by traditional methods rather than working on photographic blowups from the film. "Sometimes we do need to work over photos, but we always project them and paint them out," Pangrazio said. "This way there's no edge problem with the photo, and you can never get a blowup as sharp as a paint stroke.
"The time we spend on a painting varies from two or three days, at the least, to a week, all the way to the kind that take a whole show to finish. The first painting we start may be the last one we'll finish and it goes on right through the show. It may be six or eight months. There's one of the Death Star like that in Jedi. Sometimes the camera needs a lot of messing around with. Maybe we're stuck on something—we've come to a dead end on ideas—or it's just not looking as good as we want it to. Sometimes we just don't know what to do. Sometimes it's best to leave it alone for a while, get away from it, and come back after a time. If we think about it a while, thoughts come up that give us the idea that will make it a better shot in the end. And sometimes they take a long time just because they're complicated and there's a lot of work in them."
Pangrazio recalled one scene which was particularly grueling. It depicts a night scene in the Ewok village, which is built among the branches of gigantic trees in which scattered campfires light the dancing figures of the Ewoks. "It took weeks to paint it and get it the way we wanted it to look. Also, we were putting a lot of camera moves into our shots, including some pans and tilts that cover as much as three fields. This is not too frequently done with matte paintings, but we have very few static shots in Jedi."
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