Petro Vlahos
| Petro Vlahos | |
|---|---|
Accepting his second Oscar, c. 1993
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| Born |
Petros Vlahos August 20, 1916 Raton, New Mexico, U.S. |
| Died | February 10, 2013 (aged 96) Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Alma mater | University of California at Berkeley |
| Occupation | Special Effects Engineer |
Petro Vlahos (Greek: Πέτρος Βλάχος; August 20, 1916 – February 10, 2013), was an engineer and inventor, considered to be one of the pioneering scientific and technical innovators of the motion picture and television industries. Vlahos consistently devised solutions that made the modern blockbuster possible - he is remembered in particular for creating the Ultimatte process, which refined the colour process known as "bluescreening" or alternatively "greenscreening" to solve the transparency, edge-sharpening and "blue spill" problems of simple chroma keying, and combining this with motion control camera technology to create the modern special effects shot. This technology allows film editors in post-production to digitally remove an image of an actor working in front of a usually blue or green colored background and insert him into any computer-generated or other preexisting digital background. In recognition of his contributions he was awarded multiple Oscars, as well as an Emmy Award.
Vlahos was born in Raton, New Mexico, the son of Greek immigrants. He showed an early aptitude for electronics and ham radio and in 1941 he gained his Engineering degree from the University of California at Berkeley. He worked as a designer for Douglas Aircraft in World War II, and later as a radar engineer at Bell Laboratories. After the war, he moved to Hollywood and worked for MGM.
The technology used today as a way of combining actors with background footage still derives from the techniques he developed. Vlahos was not the first to use the blue-screen technology—it was invented by Larry Butler for the 1940 filming of The Thief Of Bagdad—but he made the process much more realistic and scientific. He created a system called the sodium vapor matte first for the spectacular 1959 remake of the epic Ben Hur, and later the Disney musical Mary Poppins (1964) which would win him an academy award. He later refined the color-difference bluescreen process that made memorable visual effects possible in films and developed a way to minimize the unfortunate side effects of earlier methods. Vlahos' breakthrough was to create a complicated laboratory process which involved separating the blue, green and red parts of each frame before combining them back together in a certain order. He moved the process along and introduced the use of motion control cameras during bluescreen work. He called his cutting-edge invention the colour-difference travelling matte scheme.
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