Roots of Cinema – Handschiegl Twin Camera Matte Process

If you’re interested in the history of visual effects, you’re probably familiar with the Williams process. By combining two separate filmed scenes, it enables a filmmaker, for example, to place an actor inside a miniature environment. The Williams process relied on what became known as a traveling matte, and I’ve written about it before, in a Cinefex article called C is for Composite. Here’s a brief extract:

Early travelling mattes were created using a variant on the bi-pack method, inven...