Fantastic Reality: The Magic and Mystery of Movie Matte Painting

Forbidden Planet (top); Spartacus (bottom)

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ Science and Technology Council will showcase the art of matte painting on Monday, December 10, at 8 p.m. at the Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood.
As per the Academy’s press release, "Fantastic Reality: The Magic and Mystery of Movie Matte Painting," hosted by Oscar nominee and Academy Visual Effects Branch governor Craig Barron, "will explore the long history of the traditional method of creating ‘virtual sets,’ in which oil paints are brushed and daubed onto a few square feet of glass or wood to be composited later with live action footage. The recent transition into the new frontiers of software and pixels will also be examined."
In conjunction with [...]

THE INVISIBLE BOY d: Herman Hoffman

FORBIDDEN PLANET DVD Review: Part I
Whereas the Freudian and Shakespearean cocktail of Forbidden Planet is a great example of sci-fi filmmaking — if not of great overall filmmaking — the other film in the package, The Invisible Boy, a black-and-white production directed by Herman Hoffman and based on a short story by Edmund Cooper, is a cute little movie that has moments as silly as Robot Monster, but that also offers some intriguing concepts that predate later sci-fi classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Colossus: The Forbin Project, and The Terminator series.
Like Robot Monster or Invaders from Mars, The Invisible Boy may all be the dream of the title character, for so much of it is propelled by [...]

FORBIDDEN PLANET – Anne Francis, Walter Pidgeon

Forbidden Planet (1956)
Direction: Fred M. Wilcox
Screenplay: Cyril Hume, from a story by Irving Block and Allen Adler
Cast: Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, Leslie Nielsen, Warren Stevens, Earl Holliman, Richard Anderson, Jack Kelly, Robby the Robot, George Wallace, Robert Dix
 

 

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
When one thinks of 1950s science-fiction films, one thinks of the sort of schlocky black-and-white B movies that were parodied on the old Mystery Science Theater 3000 television show. Yet, while there were a whole lot of films like Plan 9 from Outer Space and Robot Monster, the 1950s did have some very good, if not great, sci-fi movies such as The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The War of [...]