Arthur Widmer

Arthur Widmer (July 25, 1914, Washington, D.C. – May 28, 2006, Los Angeles, California) was an American film special effects pioneer. He invented the "Ultra Violet Traveling matte process", an early version of what would become known as bluescreen. At the age 16 he entered University of Michigan and graduated in 1935 with a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry.

Arthur Widmer began his career at Kodak in 1935, as a researcher in Rochester, New York. He learned much, and being seen as a creative thinker was attached on a three-year stint in 1943 as one of the Kodak researchers assigned to the Manhattan Project in Berkeley, California and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, as an analytical chemists developing methods of uranium analysis, which led to the development of the atomic bomb.

Post World War II, and having spent so much time at Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1947 he sought warmer climes than Rochester and moved to Kodak's Hollywood office with the introduction of Kodak's color film processing. Widmer helped introduce the new Eastman Color Negative and Positive Film, a multilayered color motion picture film that changed the dynamics of power in the movie industry.

He left Kodak in 1951 and joined Warner Brothers to design and build the first Eastman color film professional processing machine in the country and began his work with the Ultra Violet Traveling matte process. Widmer also developed and refined technologies for other motion picture processes including 3D and widescreen. He began developing Bluescreen techniques, with one of the first films to use the technique being the screen adaptation of the novella by Ernest Hemingway written in Cuba in 1951, The Old Man and the Sea starring Spencer Tracy in 1958.

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