RESTORATION OF THE HAL ROACH L&H COLLECTION

[Little Caesar]

The Hallmark DVD transfer of the Sons of the Desert also had added music (fine music by itself, but it should have never been added arbitrarily to the movie) as well as fade outs/fade ins to allow for commercial breaks. I still refuse to buy Hallmark cards to this day because of their shameful treatment of L&H.

[sethb]

As I've noted elsewhere, under current copyright law, apparently the holders of copyrighted material can do as they please with it, including modifying it, neglecting it and even destroying it. But that doesn't mean that they SHOULD do so.

Although the AFI has created some sort of "Honor Roll" of certain features and shorts, I understand it's basically meaningless and has no teeth; it's not akin to Federally mandated historical preservation of buildings and so forth, and does not guarantee the preservation of the films that are listed. And unfortunately the United States has never adopted the concept of "moral rights" that I understand is the law in many European countries, which prevents the mutilation of a creator's work. (And of course, Americans never respected foreign copyrights anyway, as writers like Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ultimately discovered). SETH

[All Darc]

Vintege Matte effects on Hall Roach:

http://nzpetesmatteshot.blogspot.com/20 ... udios.html

Uuhhnn... It's not just that the painting was bad, if we imagine some old matte painting effects wasn't very good as the ones from 90's and early 2000's, before digital replace all.

Like we see in this pictures, in many cases the glass frame for paint the set, was quite small, so the painter had no space to put a detailed painting.





I saw a documentary about matte painting. It started as simple paintings on glass to put in front of camera, and they painted it in the set of shooting, locations... After thay started to paint on a \FX studio the quality became better.

I don't know if all matte was like the documentary showed, but it was not in optical prints printing togetter the film and the paint into another film, but it was direct shooting the painting in the same camera negative where the shooting of live action was made. So they avoid to go down two generations in image quality.

They shoot the live action already behind a glass, with the area of the future painting couvered with pure black, to mask. They shoot a extra segment just to develope in lab, but keep the principal film of the shooting undeveloped.
In the studio FX they project the developed film to to align to a glass screen, tracing the matter division lines that . The same camera that project also shoots, and so they can align it properly to shoot the final painting.

I would like to know if the matte painting was preserved, sold or whatever happened...
The should create a Matter Painting Museum in Hollywood.

Anybody have any information about a silent that used matte painting ???

Metropolis use pure painting in some short scenes of the upper city, and effects that combined miniatures with life scale, using mirrors to mix boths or perspective effects. But as far as I know Metropolis have no matte painting .

[Derek Gee]

My understanding was that although better elements were available to it, Hallmark took the lazy/cheap/quick way out on this.

Legend has it that Hallmark/Lion's Gate never wanted to release the L & H DVD's in the first place, but were "persuaded" by a buyer for Wal-Mart. That might explain the lack of effort spent on it.

Derek

[gjohnson]

Yes. I heard it was a tax dodge.

[fwtep]

Anybody have any information about a silent that used matte painting ???

Look for a book called The Invisible Art. There's some silent stuff in there.

[Brooksie]

Regarding matte paintings - there are two slightly different techniques getting mixed up here, the `glass shot' and the `matte shot'. Both have been in use since the very early days - the 1907 Gaumont film `Missions of California' is the earliest on record, although the methods weren't perfected until around 1911.

In the glass shot, a piece of transparent window glass is situated between the camera and the scene. Additional picture elements are painted directly onto the glass, and the scene is shot through it.

This was known in the industry as the `Dawn Technique' for its probable creator, Norman Dawn. Dawn used this very effectively in a number of films. `For The Term of His Natural Life' (1926) contains an example of one such shot, where a ruined convict barracks had its roof and missing walls replaced by painted elements.

Dawn was also an early practitioner of the matte painting, whereby a portion of the shot is blocked out, leaving part of the film undeveloped. The film is wound through a second time, the developed parts covered, and the missing photo elements replaced by filming a specially painted matte. Again, there's examples of this in `For The Term of His Natural Life', where a studio ceiling is replaced by an elaborate plaster ceiling.

Dawn's a fascinating figure. He spent most of his career at Universal, but also did effects work for Gaumont, Keystone, Triangle, MGM and others. His papers are preserved at the University of Texas (see http://www.utexas.edu/opa/blogs/cultura ... echniques/) - he meticulously recorded every special effect he ever did, so I'd love to see them.