VIEWS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD.
The old civilizations, Rome, Egypt, Greece, all of them have been
portrayed by movies. Sometimes they tried to show them realistically,
some other times they added some fantasy elements.
Matte paintings and miniatures have been used many times to recreate
the splendor of those empires.
In this page I show some samples of the FX art made for
those movies.
CLEOPATRA (1965) Joseph Mankiewicz.
BEN-HUR (1925) Fred Niblo
Cedric Gibbons and Arnold Gillespie made use of foreground miniatures to create the spectacular circus for the chariots race.
Some interesting names I have took from the IMDB credit list:
Kenneth Gordon MacLean... miniatures
Frank D. Williams... traveling matte shots
Ferdinand P. Earle.... art effects
Ferdinand P. Earle.... director: Nativity scene
Henry Hathaway... assistant director
William Wyler.... assistant director
BEN- HUR (1959) directed by William Wyler.
Arnold Gillespie was again in charge of FX department. Lee LeBlanc and Matthew Yuricich made the matte paintings.
And again there are some curious names on the crew list.
Sergio Leone ...second unit director (uncredited)
Richard Thorpe... third unit director (uncredited)
Mentor Huebner...primary conceptual artist and production illustrator
(uncredited)
Harold E. Wellman...additional photographer/camera operator: third
unit
And Cliff Shirpser who worked on both versions, with an interesting credit list as FX camera operator.
SPARTACUS. (Stanley Kubrick) 1960.
Click over Kirk Douglas to see images from the movie.
HELEN OF TROY (Robert Wise) 1956.
Click over the picture and embark wit Helen and Paris to the mythical city of Troy.
SOLOMON AND SHEBA (King Vidor) 1959
Clik over Yul Brinner to see some images of the movie
ALEXANDER THE GREAT (Robert Rossen) 1956
