Matte Shot

A shot in which only a part of the shot, usually the area immediately surrounding any of the characters present on-screen, is a live action shot. The rest is a painting, most often used to portray a non-existent vista. Rather than build a vast set, they shoot the actors on a plain set with a few background elements, with parts of the camera frame matted off by opaque cards. Later, an opposite set of cards, matting the parts of the frame that were already exposed, is used to shoot the background; in most cases this is a detailed, realistic "matte painting" done in acrylics on glass by a dedicated artist, but it could also be miniatures or location footage. Low-budget films, and films where whatever was in front of the matte was hoped to be distracting, sometimes used paintings on canvas.

In practice, this requires masking certain areas of the footage shot to selectively control which areas are exposed. These masks, called mattes (hence "Matte Shot"), delineate the parts of each shot which are to be "filled in" by the other shots when they are combined. If done properly, no "edges" or borders" between the mattes should be visible, and the image should appear to be a seamless whole.

When one or more elements are in motion such that every frame's mattes are different, it is called a "traveling matte". When the matte or mattes involved in the footage do not change shape or size during the course of the effect, it is a "static matte". The page image shows a static matte.

With the advent of high-definition television, matte paintings can fall into Conspicuous CG territory: peer closely at any long shot that lasts more than a few seconds where the main action is going on in the foreground, and the background will very likely be a matte painting.

In the electronic editing era, the matte shot is often used to refer to a Chroma Key shot, which uses a similar principle. This system has replaced any number of early film tricks. Classic Matte Shots had one advantage over Chroma Key, though: you could matte anything of any color equally well (or badly).

Examples of Matte Shot include:

Film

Ghostbusters uses quite a few of these, most notably during the shots of the apartment building, which change depending on how bad things are (the last shot of it has pure black smoke shooting out of the top).
- The DVD features a great and fun extra where you can compare the shot filmed, to the one shown in the film, where you can really see all the mattes.
The Star Wars original trilogy made extensive use of matte shots to create the complex space battle sequences.
- The Original Trilogy had a ton of matte shots. Lucas' addiction to CGI used to be an addiction to matte paintings.
The very end of Raiders of the Lost Ark has a famous matte shot. When we see the overhead shot of a worker moving down a narrow warehouse aisle, all those sprawling stacks of crates are created as a painting.
- A more interesting matte shot is the PanAmerican seaplane; the plane, which was not seaworthy (it was, in fact, still being restored) was composited into shots of a loading dock built on the ILM grounds and shots of San Francisco Bay (for the water). The matte was even painted to touch up unrestored areas of the plane and put the PanAm logo on!
Perhaps the most famous is Mary Poppins, which reproduced the entirety of 1910 London on sixty-four sheets of glass.
- Disney also used the technique to add two stories to the exterior shots of Pollyanna's aunt's house in Pollyanna. The real house (the McDonald Mansion in Santa Rosa, California) is a single story.
The famous A Storm Is Coming shot in Terminator 2: Judgement Day is achieved via a matte painting.
The "cliff jump" scene from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid features a matte-painted cliff wall.
Three Hundred deliberately uses colors, lighting, and matte paintings to achieve that retro "filmed on a sound stage" look.
The Schüfftan process was an earlier variation that involved reflecting the picture or piece of scenery onto a mirror, removing the unnecessary bits of reflective surface from the mirror, and filming the actors (and the rest of the set, if any) through the now-transparent glass. First developed for Metropolis, it also shows up in movies like The Thirty-Nine Steps (where it was necessary because in 1935 you couldn't really shoot a huge crowd scene inside the London Palladium), and according to The Other Wiki, Peter Jackson used it in Return of the King.
This page of The B Movie Comic, which turns out to be a subversion.
The film version of A Series of Unfortunate Events uses this for the Briny Beach and the railroad scenes. It's a lot more elaborate though, as only the sky was matted; everything else was real, but scaled to give the illusion of distance (e.g. the crops in the field were actually made smaller and smaller as they approached the matte backdrop).
The massive ENCOM cubicle farm in Tron is mostly a matte background that comes just shy of melding perfectly with the actual cubicles—if you look closely, you can see a slight gap between the two.
The Dark Crystal used several of these shots.
There are over one hundred matte paintings in Gone with the Wind. The exterior of Tara was only built partially, with matte painting filling in the rest for distant shots. As was the custom at the time, none of the sets had ceilings so that studio lights and sound recording equipment could go there. In some shots, ceilings were added using matte paintings.
In Citizen Kane, the outside of Xanadu is mostly a series of matte paintings.

Live Action Television

The television version of The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy pioneered Matte Shots within Matte Shots.
Fraggle Rock made incredibly extensive use of the travelling matte, and actually named a character -- Uncle Traveling Matt -- after it.
Every local newscast is never shot in a building with an amazingly wide view of the city in the studio out a window; it's either a big blown up picture on a sheet called a Duratrans or projected on a screen. There are window studios on street level, but these mainly have a panoramic view of only several streets at best.
Star Trek featured these as a staple, being special-effects-heavy and with many alien locales. The 90s series, however, gradually phased in more and more Chroma Key (in fact, they pioneered quite a few chroma key techniques).
- The original '60s series and Next Generation sometimes used the same matte paintings more than once, to represent places on different planets.

Video Games

They're not technically Matte Shots, but the same concept appears in a lot of late-1990s RPG games. Baldurs Gate (and the other Infinity Engine games, Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment) and games like Diablo had what were essentially paintings for a background with characters and monsters moving on top of them. There were areas you could go (floors, steps, hills) and ares you couldn't (walls, cliffs, etc.). The action took place over top of a painting, like in a Matte Shot.