MICHAEL PANGRAZIO didn’t know how to paint when he joined ILM, but after a crash course on STAR WARS (1977) by Ralph McQuarrie, Pangrazio later created some of the most famous matte paintings of all time.
Pangrazio created the Death Star’s tractor-beam shaft which Obi Wan narrowly walks around. Over the original trilogy Pangrazio crafted more mattes, including the frozen Hoth landscape in EMPIRE (1980) and spacecraft hangers in ROTJ (1983)
Some of Pangrazio’s best work came from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981), with the closing warehouse sequence quite possibly his most famous matte painting – which took him 3 months to complete.
Pangrazio rose to become a big player at ILM, with notable contributions to DARK CRYSTAL (1982) and POLTERGEIST (1982) among many others.
YOUNG SHERLOCK HOLMES (1985) had relatively few matte shots. But Pangrazio also contributed to its ground-breaking VFX - it being the first feature film with a fully CG character achieved by ILM.
Following such success, in 1988 Pangrazio formed the company “Matte World” alongside VFX cameraman Craig Barron, creating seamless matte-effects for films like STEAL THE SKY (1988), PRANCER (1989) and MALICE (1993).
The company changed to “Matte World Digital” in 1992, embrace new technological tools for innovative environment-building in CASINO (1995) and ZODIAC (2007) – resurrecting past periods through “radiosity” that replicates “light-bounce” (or the diffusion of light) off surfaces in a scene.
Eventually Pangrazio become VFX head of WETA Digital – the company founded by Peter Jackson and used on LOTR, KING KONG (2005) and the AVATAR franchise. Not bad for someone who began by cleaning buckets of paint.
Credit to NZPete's blog posts and to Craig Barron and Mark Cotta Vaz's book The Invisible Art: Legends of Movie Matte Paintings for their thorough research and materials!
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