Case Study : Dunning Pomeroy and Williams Process

Case Study: Dunning Pomeroy Process/ Williams Process
By Valerie Rodriguez

The movie industry was booming during the 1930’s. This was a time when creative technicians started testing out new techniques to improve and create different special effects for the movies. One of the special effects used was the traveling matte. The traveling matte painting are two photographs combined to create a picture and then is changed in different shots to keep the illusion of the effect. Many traveling mattes where used during the 1930’s movie making, the most effective and innovative of the time is the Dunning Pomeroy Process and the Williams Process.

In the early 1930’s there was only two ways to make a traveling matte, the Dunning Process was on of them. The Dunning Process was first created by a seventeen year old named C. Dodge Dunning in 1925. This new technology was the primary use in the 1930’s moviemaking. The first movie to use this process was the 1933 movie King Kong, which Dunning was working for at the time. The Dunning process was basically the beginning of the blue and green screen. This process was used to create a special effect of combining two pictures, a foreground and a background.

The Dunning Process special effect required a lot of time to create. The background scene, which is called a plate, was photographed. The technicians made the negatives and used the positive print for the process. The gray and black areas of the print was bleached and dyed orange. The clear parts of the photo stayed clear. The next step of the process is called bipacking. When the foreground needed to be shot, The technician placed the orange print in front of a fresh negative print. This negative is called a duplicate or “dupe”. The step after that is the foreground was filmed in front of a white screen. The white screen was lit blue and the person in front of the screen was lit orange. When the scene was filmed the subject passed trough the orange print and the effect was created. This effect created the illusion of a exotic place in a studio back lot with out the need of filming on location.

During the filming of the 1933 King Kong, Linwood G. Dunn and William Ulm both designed and engineered an improved optical printer. This printer, which is called the William Process, was more precise, reliable, and had a wider range of capabilities. The filmmakers tested out and used this process for when King Kong opened the gates at Skull Island. Soon after the Williams process took over the Dunning Process and the other movie studios started adapting and evolving to the new technology.

The Dunning and William Process was the beginning of the blue and green screening processes for composing matte paintings. The 1933 movie King Kong helped create new technology and encourage new inventions. During the 1930’s these processes became important to filmmakers of that time to create the right effects. These processes also show how the movies technology evolved quickly over time.