{"id":700,"date":"2013-02-21T11:40:00","date_gmt":"2013-02-21T16:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/2013\/02\/21\/celebrating-petro-vlahos-father-of-modern-visual-effects\/"},"modified":"2013-02-21T11:40:00","modified_gmt":"2013-02-21T16:40:00","slug":"celebrating-petro-vlahos-father-of-modern-visual-effects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/2013\/02\/21\/celebrating-petro-vlahos-father-of-modern-visual-effects\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebrating Petro Vlahos, father of modern visual effects"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"clear: both;text-align: center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-o4-aVT7wb2M\/USY_-qQDKwI\/AAAAAAAAAbc\/RWBfO8270mw\/s1600\/VLAHOS2-obit-articleLarge.jpg\" style=\"clear: right;float: right;margin-bottom: 1em;margin-left: 1em\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" height=\"200\" src=\"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-o4-aVT7wb2M\/USY_-qQDKwI\/AAAAAAAAAbc\/RWBfO8270mw\/s200\/VLAHOS2-obit-articleLarge.jpg\" width=\"187\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<p>Petro Vlahos, an unheralded genius of modern filmmaking, died yesterday at age 96. Though not a household name in special effects like James Cameron, Peter Jackson, or Michael Bay, Vlahos laid the foundation for all future filmmakers. Vlahos invented bluescreen (&#8220;chroma key&#8221;) technology, first used in 1940 for <i>The Thief of Bagdad<\/i> and still used today in nearly every film with a visual effects shot.<\/p>\n<p>Vlahos&#8217;s initial uses of the bluescreen were fairly tame, allowing Charlton Heston to race chariots in <i>Ben-Hur<\/i> or letting Dick Van Dyke dance with animated penguins in <i>Mary Poppins<\/i>. Nowadays, entire sets are constructed from chroma key backdrops, and most video editing software supports some form of greenscreen technology. Vlahos&#8217;s work has been improved over the years but remains conceptually unchanged from his original idea 73 years ago.<\/p>\n<p>It would be ridiculous to list every movie that uses some form of Vlahos&#8217;s chroma key technology, as it would probably include every major film of the last half-century. Instead, here are a few movies to which Petro Vlahos directly lent his visual effects wizardry. Each one of these won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0052618\">Ben-Hur<\/a> \u2013 HU DVD 3857<br \/><a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0058331\">Mary Poppins<\/a> \u2013 HU DVD 7850<br \/><a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0033152\/\">The Thief of Bagdad: An Arabian Fantasy<\/a> \u2013 HU DVD 8101\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Petro Vlahos, an unheralded genius of modern filmmaking, died yesterday at age 96. Though not a household name in special effects like James Cameron, Peter Jackson, or Michael Bay, Vlahos laid the foundation for all future filmmakers. Vlahos invented bluescreen (&#8220;chroma key&#8221;) technology, first used in 1940 for The Thief of Bagdad and still used [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[324],"class_list":["post-700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-obituaries","tag-special-effects"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}