Film pioneer brought visual effects to screen

LOS ANGELES — Petro Vlahos, a two-time Academy Award winner whose blue- and green-screen technique on movies like Mary Poppins and Ben-Hur made the modern blockbuster possible, has died. He was 96.

His family said he died on Feb. 10, the Los Angeles Times reports. The Hollywood Reporter said Vlahos’s company, Ultimatte, also announced the death. No details were released.

The night before his death, an ailing Vlahos was on the minds of many at the Scientific and Technical Oscars ceremony, where he’d been a constant presence through the years and where his acolytes in “composite photography” took home most of the trophies.

“He created the whole of composite photography as we know it at this time,” visual effects supervisor and one of the night’s top winners Bill Taylor said of Vlahos, drawing a line from his early work to recent technical marvels like Life of Pi.

“Whenever you see Mary Poppins dancing with penguins, when you see Pi in a boat in the middle of the ocean … you are seeing … Vlahos’s genius at work.”

Others had tried “composite photography” before, combining separately filmed actors and sets into one shot, but results had been spotty, and actors often appeared with a halo of light around them that killed the effect.

Vlahos took huge leaps forward in the process with the chariot race in the 1959 Charlton Heston epic Ben-Hur and in Julie Andrews’s and Dick Van Dyke’s romp through a chalk-drawing wonderland in 1964’s Mary Poppins.

He kept up his partnership with Disney in effects-heavy films like 1969’s The Love Bug and 1971’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

In subsequent decades when science-fiction and fantasy films became dominant at the box office, Vlahos’s techniques became dominant in filmmaking, essential to movies like Avatar and to every film in the Star Wars saga.