Petro Vlahos, a two-time Oscar winner whose blue-screen and green-screen technique on movies like Mary Poppins and Ben-Hur made the modern blockbuster possible, has died at the age of 96.

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

His family said Vlahos died on February 10, according to the Los Angeles Times. The Hollywood Reporter said Vlahos’s company, Ultimatte, also announced the death. No further 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 had been a constant presence through the years and where his acolytes in composite photography took home most of the trophies.

Visual effects supervisor Bill Taylor said: “He created the whole of composite photography as we know it at this time,” 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 the results had been patchy, 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 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.

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

He and his collaborators won an Academy Award for their composite processes in 1965, and he and his son Paul Vlahos shared another Oscar in 1995 for the blue-screen advances made by Ultimatte.

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