Research and Understanding Mattes & Matte painting

A matte painting is a painted representation of a landscape, set or a distant location that allows filmmakers to create the illusion of an environment that doesn't exist in real life or would be too expensive or impossible to build or visit.The first ever matte painting was made in 1907 by Norman Dawn for a movie called Missions Of California . In the film Shooter matte paintings were used to make a distant shot of a river and burning buildings .Later on through 1990's traditional matte paintings were still being used but in a more digitally . One of the most known films Titanic by James Cameron used a painting of a rescue ship by Chris Evans . 

Ghostbusters 2 also used matte painting of a building as shown above I am guessing it was done because the amount the cost of shooting it in real life may of been too expensive . I think the matte painting shot worked very well and it looked realistic enough to make it believably watching it the first time .



In this picture above you can see I highlighted the differences that both of the definitions from two different sources have.

Combined Definition
Known as Matte Painting the 100 year old art form has developed over the years from physical to digital which enhanced the film industry by a lot.It is used to show scenes or locations which cannot be shown in real life either because it's too expensive to shoot or it's impossible to shoot it.

Differences in the definitions
By reading both of the sources each source has there own different definition.From Wikipedia the definition tells us more what matte painting is used for and why where as in the other source it tells us what it actually means.