Walter Percy Day
Walter Percy Day O.B.E. was a British painter best remembered for his work as a matte artist and special effects technician in the film industry.
Professional names include W. Percy Day; Percy Day; “Pop” or “Poppa” Day, owing to his collaboration with sons Arthur George Day draughtsman, Thomas Sydney Day, stills photographer and cameraman, and stepson, Peter Ellenshaw, who also worked in this field.
Early life
Walter Percy Day was born in Luton to Eli Day and Lucy Day, née Crawley, the second of three children. From 1908 to 1912, he resided in Tunisia, at Sidi Bou Saïd and Tunis, where he pursued a career as a painter of portraits and Orientalist scenes. The dramatic consequences of the “affaire du Jellaz” uprising obliged the family to return to Britain early in 1912.The silent film era
In 1919, at Ideal Films Studios in Borehamwood, near Elstree Day mastered the art of illusionist techniques. Special effects such as those produced by Day enabled directors to enlarge their repertoire and to tackle subjects which might otherwise have been too costly to produce. In 1922, he relocated to France to its more vibrant cinema. There he introduced the use of the glass shot into French cinema. Used for the first time in Henry Roussel's Les Opprimés, released in 1923, the process was hailed by a critic as a revolution in cinematography. Among the directors with whom Day collaborated during the twenties were Jean Renoir, Raymond Bernard, Julien Duvivier, and Abel Gance. In addition to creating visual effects for Napoléon, Day also played the role of the British Admiral Hood in the film. From 1928, Day's studio became a team, when sons Arthur George Day and Thomas Sydney Day began to work for their father, the former as draughtsman and the latter as cameraman and stills photographer, starting with Léon Poirier's .In the late 1920s, he learned a new technique while working at the Elstree studio on Alfred Hitchcock's The Ring, that used mirrors and angling to superimpose a miniature over a scene. The inventor, Eugen Schüfftan, whose office was opposite the studios, taught him the process directly.
When shooting the façade of the department store in Julien Duvivier's film Au Bonheur des Dames proved to be an insurmountable difficulty, Day utilised the stationary matte, a process similar to that patented by Norman Dawn on 11 June 1918.
In the British film industry
A meeting with Alexander Korda opened up new perspectives for the Day studio. Day worked with Korda on The Private Life of Henry VIII a film starring Charles Laughton. Day accordingly established a studio in Iver and from 1936, directed the matte department at Denham Studios. The artist painted mattes and created trick shots for numerous films by Korda and his stable of directors, who included his brother Zoltan Korda, Anthony Asquith, William Cameron Menzies, Michael Powell, Lothar Mendes and David Lean. In 1946 Day joined the Korda group as Director of Special Effects at Korda's new premises at Shepperton Studios where he remained until his retirement in 1954.Poppa Day's team disbanded once World War II began as all three sons enlisted. Pop Day trained some promising young matte painters, including Wally Veevers, who took over the matte department at Shepperton Studios when Pop Day retired in 1952.
During the war, the film studios made a series of heroic war films, aimed at boosting the morale of the beleaguered British, including Powell and Pressburger's 49th Parallel, Noël Coward and David Lean's In Which We Serve and Leslie Howard's The First of the Few, A Matter of Life and Death , Anna Karenina, and The Third Man. In Laurence Olivier's production of Henry V, many of the Agincourt battle scenes were painted on glass by Day, who contrived to make the horses' heads move, the pennants flutter and whirring motion of a flight of arrows in the completed shots. The Powell and Pressburger production of I Know Where I'm Going! contains a sequence in which the hero and heroine's boat gets sucked into the Corryvreckan whirlpool. Black Narcissus was shot entirely on the Pinewood Studios back lot with matte of the Himalayan mountain range painted by Day and his assistants.
In 1948, Day was awarded the O.B.E. for his services to British cinema. Cameraman Christopher Challis, has rendered homage to Percy Day's achievements: "Being able to marry painted backgrounds on glass to real action foregrounds opened up a new world to film makers… To appreciate the magnitude of his achievement, one has to understand the complexity of the work. Hours of painstaking labour with many retakes to obtain perfection. Now it is all too easy with computers and electronics and few people remain who can understand just how complicated it was. name should certainly be numbered among the great film pioneers, alongside Gaumont, Lumière, etc". Michael Powell, for his part, hailed Percy Day as "the greatest trick-man and film wizard that I have ever known…" Percy Day’s legacy was ranked by the British daily The Independent in 2008 as on a par with the great French special effects pioneer Georges Méliès.
Death
Day died in Los Angeles.W. Percy Day filmography
Date of shooting followed by date of release- The Thruster
- Les Opprimés
- The Promised Land
- The Princess and the Clown
- Destinée
- Le Bossu
- The Flame
- Salammbô
- Nana, art direction: Claude Autant-Lara
- Napoléon
- Autour de Napoléon. Abel Gance et son Napoléon
- Michel Strogoff
- The Chess Player
- Belphégor
- L'Homme à l'Hispano
- The Loves of Casanova
- Croquette
- Le Martyre de Sainte-Maxence
- Le Mystère de la Tour Eiffel
- Saint Joan the Maid
- The Ring
- The Maelstrom of Paris
- The Divine Voyage
- Vivre
- Maman Colibri
- La Vie miraculeuse de Thérèse Martin
- Cagliostro
- Au Bonheur des Dames
- The Three Masks
- Le Roi des aulnes
- End of the World
- Autour de la fin du monde
- Wine Cellars
- La fée du logis
- The Three Musketeers
- Le Crime du Bouif
- The Private Life of Henry VIII
- The Private Life of Don Juan
- The Scarlet Pimpernel
- Scrooge
- Moscow Nights
- Elephant Boy
- Sanders of the River
- A Tale of Two Cities
- The Ghost Goes West
- The Man Who Could Work Miracles
- Things to Come
- Rembrandt
- Fire Over England
- Forget Me Not
- The Drum
- Action for Slander
- South Riding
- Dark Journey
- I Claudius
- Paradise for Two
- Storm in a Teacup
- Victoria the Great
- Knight Without Armour
- Return of the Scarlet Pimpernel
- Sixty Glorious Years
- The Divorce of Lady X
- Prison Without Bars
- The Four Feathers
- Wuthering Heights
- The Spy in Black
- Q Planes
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame
- Jamaica Inn
- The Mikado
- Over the Moon
- Major Barbara
- Conquest of the Air
- The Thief of Bagdad
- Lydia
- 49th Parallel
- That Hamilton Woman
- Secret Mission
- The First of the Few
- In Which We Serve
- Jungle Book
- The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
- The Demi-Paradise
- This Happy Breed
- A Canterbury Tale
- Henry V
- Blithe Spirit
- Brief Encounter
- I Know Where I'm Going!
- Caesar and Cleopatra
- Perfect Strangers
- A Matter of Life and Death
- Panique
- Great Expectations
- Men of Two Worlds
- Black Narcissus
- A Man About the House
- An Ideal Husband
- Mine Own Executioner
- Anna Karenina
- The Fallen Idol
- The Winslow Boy
- Oliver Twist
- Bonnie Prince Charlie
- The Third Man
- The Last Days of Dolwyn
- The Mudlark
- The Elusive Pimpernel
- The Cure for Love
- Pandora and the Flying Dutchman
- The Black Rose
- Gone to Earth
- Outcast of the Islands
Monographies
- Linda d’Agostino Clinger, The Garden Within. The Art of Peter Ellenshaw. Venice, Mill Pond Press, 1996
- British Film Institute presents… Napoléon vu par Abel Gance, Presentation programme, Festival Hall, London, 2000
- Kenneth Brownlow, Napoléon, Abel Gance’s Classic Film. London 1983, p. 118–119
- Ivan Butler, Cinema in Britain. An Illustrated History. London, 1973, p. 75, 153.
- Jack Cardiff, Magic Hour. London: Faber & Faber, 1996
- The Chess Player, Thames Television and National Film Archive Presentation Programme, London, 1990
- Ian Christie, Arrows of Desire. The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, London, 1985
- John Culhane, Special Effects in the Movies. How they do it. New York: Ballantine Books, 1981, p. 45, 50–52, 155–156
- Maurice Culot. Le temps des boutiques. De l’échoppe à eBay. Brussels: A.A.M., s.d., p. 10–11
- Max Douy, Jacques Douy, Décors de Cinéma. Les Studios français de Mélès à nos jours. Paris, 1993, p. 45
- Charles Drazin, In Search of the Third Man. London: Methuen, 1999
- Peter Ellenshaw, Ellenshaw under Glass. Going to the Matte for Disney. Santa Clarita: Camphor Tree Publishers, 2003
- Karol Kulik, Alexander Korda. The Man Who Could Work Miracles. Lond, 1975
- Philip Leibfried; Malcolm Willits; Jim Danforth. Alexander Korda’s The Thief of Bagdad. An Arabian Fantasy. Pasadena : Castle Press, 2003
- Rachel Low. Film Making in 1930’s Britain. London: Allen & Unwin, 1985, p. 250
- Michael Powell, A Life in Movies: An Autobiography. London : Mandarin, 1986
- Michael Powell. Million-Dollar Movie. New York: Random House, 1995
- Christopher Finch, Special Effects. Creating Movie Magic. New York: Abbeville Press, 1984, p. 68
- Rolf Giesen, Special Effects. King Kong, Orphée und die Reise zum Mond. Ebersberg: Edition Achteinhalb, 1985, p. 159
- Alan McKenzie; Derek Ware. Hollywood Tricks of the Trade. London: Multimedia Publications, 1986, pp. 19–20
Articles
- J.-Nicolas Gung’L, « Chronique artistique. Percy Day, peintre de portraits », La Tunisie Illustrée, April 1910.
- « Picture with a Story. Mr. Percy Day Explains his Academic Painting”. Daily Chronicle, 12 May 1919.
- Georges Baye, « A propos du film Les Opprimés. Révolution dans le décor cinématographique », Ciné Miroir, 15 March 1923
- « En marge du Joueur d’échecs », Cinémagazine, n° 2, 14 January 1927, special issue
- La Petite Illustration Cinématographique, n° 8, 5 February 1927, special issue
- “La prise de vues”, Le courrier cinématographique, 29 mars 1929, p. 18–19
- Le Courrier cinématographique, March 1929 “Special Effects Teams Save Time and Money”, Kinematograph Weekly, 2 October 1947 Kinematograph Weekly, 24 October 1946, p. 15
- Walter Percy Day.“The Origin and Development of the Matte Shot”. Fourth Newman Memorial Lecture”, The Photographic Journal, October 1948.
- Egon Larsen, "Here is the Inside Story of the Magician of British Films", Cavalcade, 21 May 1949
- Douglas Hague, “Painted Matte Shots”, British Kinematographic Society Magazine, vol. 19, n° 6, 1951, p. 166
- “Pop Day, 75, goes back to college”. Kent Messenger, 30 April 1954
- “Trauner au naturel”, Libération, 13 March 1984, p. 24
- Edouard Waintrop, “Blimp Blimp Hourrah”, Libération, 2 April 1992, p. 42
- Gilbert Adair, “The Other Side of Harry Lime”, Evening Standard, 23 August 1999, p. 42
- James Christopher, “Britain’s best bar nun?”, The Times, 4 August 2005, p. T2
- Geoffrey MacNab, “He Made Monsters”, The Independent, 20 June 2008.