The matte shot painted on glass

The skill that ended is a physical one. A painter worked in oil or acrylic on a sheet of glass placed in front of the lens, matched to the camera position, so that the painted part of the frame and the filmed part were exposed together. Matte World Digital and its competitors moved the same painters onto tablets during the 1990s, and the picture is still made by a person, but the alignment, the compositing and the camera move became software operations that no longer require optical registration on set. What has not been ceded is the painting itself: deciding what a place looks like, where the light falls and where the eye should go remains a matter of judgement, and the digital tools only made the frame easier to change afterwards.