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The actor is photographed against a bright blue background and lit with conventional white light. The camera exposes a single length of ordinary color negative stock. From this negative, a black-and-white master positive is made: one that is allowed to record only the blue elements of the image. This master positive is opaque in the background. When it and the full-color negative are printed in bi-pack onto black-and-white stock, the result is a black-and-white positive with a clear background area. This process is then repeated with a master positive that contains only the red elements of the image, yielding a positive that is black in the background. A high-contrast dupe negative is made of this opaque-background positive; the result shows the actor in negative, the background clear. When the blue-filtered positive and the red-filtered high-contrast negative are rephotographed together - via bi-pack optical printing - onto high-contrast black-and-white stock, the result is the traveling matte. Its background is opaque, with a moving hole in it in the shape of the actor. The negative of this traveling matte becomes the traveling countermatte.Then the color original and the traveling matte are printed in bi-pack, producing a color image of the actor against a black background. (The resulting composite need not be in color, of course if the film is to be released in black-and-white.) When the color original and the traveling counter-matte are printed in bi-pack the result is a color image of the background with an opaque hole in the shape of the actor. When these two are double-printed, the foreground and background areas appear to have been photographed at the same time and in the same location; this composite is the end product, and it can then be cut into the rest of the film like any normal shot.
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