The Parting of the Red Sea

Photograph from the `Parting of the Red Sea' sequence from the film THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, 1956.

'the film's most complicated and spectacular scene was a combiation of over a dozen original negatives and corresponding travelling mattes: the Egyptian terrain, foreground actors filmed against a blue screen, the two water walls (3 negatives for each wall), matte-painted rocks, a separately filmed water element for the wave that opens the sea and numerous exposures of miniature sky.