Petro Vlahos was a pioneering special effects director in Hollywood and is famous for developing the blue screen technique and he did this for the Motion Picture Research Council.
In 1976, he also founded the Ultimate Corporation that is based in Chatsworth in California in the United States of America.
His inspiration behind developing the blue screen was the goal to invent a travelling matte system that was better than the one in existence at that time in order to make the sequences in the motion pictures much more realistic and life like, and his success paved the way for the widespread use of this brilliant and simple, yet effective technique.
In 1964, Petro Vlahos won his first ever Oscar or Academy Award for this Blue Screen Compositing Technology.
The first units that were produced by his company Ultimate Corporation were 'black boxes' and that too, analog ones and these ultimately evolved computer software and digital hardware that the company produces nowadays.
In the year 1978, Petro Vlahos was awarded an Emmy Award for his contributions to the technology of matte compositing.
This was followed in 1994 by another Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement for his contributions in bringing the blue screen technique to the motion pictures that revolutionized cinema in a way similar to what happened after the introduction of Talkies.
In fact in 1995, the first software that was produced by the company that he founded also won an Oscar.
The original and innovative concepts that made Petro Vlahos such a legend are still used nowadays by his company and these concepts of his have seen various enhancements as well as expansions over the last few years and this allows the users of Ultimate Corporation software to create composites that are completely seamless apart from preserving the fine details of smoke, hair, motion blur, mist as well as shadows and at the same time, automatically suppressing from the forefront subject the blue spill.
This enables in the formation of frames that would in most cases, be too difficult and risky to shoot and would be somewhat impractical as well.
Petro Vlahos was responsible for creating the modern cinema and the techniques and he managed to perfect these techniques with limited technology back in those days are still expansively used and brought into celluloid for the viewers to watch.
He is a legend in his field and will remain so forever.