VFX Movie - Mary Poppins

Instead of looking further into the future for vfx movies, I decided I would look at one that I loved as child and had the heigh of vfx for it's time in the movie. Mary Poppins and internationally known story, book, film, musical and much more; continuing to capture hearts of many people even 50 years after it was released. So I then decided to check in a little more detail just what VFX they had available to them, and apart from complex CGI they really did have almost anything everything was just analogue and 'non' reversible. The majority of their effects came from the commonly known "Matter Shot" (which I will be researching later). But looking at breakdowns of the movie there so many scenes that you wouldn't normally realise was fake. There was many, many, many examples I could use through out the film as it's built out of matte shots, but I will post a few below.

Each of these images are easy to recognise what it a matte and what isn't, the picture above shows a boat scene with only a small portion being from a camera. It's incredible what they were aloud to get away with back then but it worked, it was magical and people loved it.

This sequence I love from the movie, it's almost a fully painted set of London as the children run through it. Having almost everything paint and being able to pull it off is amazing, I think the fact that it was that style of film that let people, let them get away with it! Literally the top picture is ALL paint, the children are added with a sodium matte; as is the same in the second frame, incredible.

This shot above is great example for the use "sodium vapour travelling matte system", it gave them the ability to matte very fine objects as diaphanous material such as Marys' veil on her hat. It gave them near perfect results with no fringing. Disney borrowed this technique from a company known as Rank Laboratories, located in England it became almost a feature on the majority of travelling matte shots up to late 70's. In some movies it was used in virtually 100's of shots, often when it wasn't even needed. A great movie that used the techniques it had at the time to its utter best, but what else would you expect from the film giant it's self Disney.