One of Mather's matte paintings in "Two Days and Two Nights".
William "Bill" Mather is a visual effects artist specialized in creating matte paintings who worked as digital matte artist for Industrial Light & Magic on Star Trek Generations and created matte paintings for the Star Trek: Enterprise first season episode "Two Days and Two Nights" showing the surface of the planet Risa.
Mather created digital matte paintings for ILM on four Star Wars films in the '90s as well as dozens of matte paintings and digital matte paintings on the adventure series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992-1993) and its following film productions between 1994 and 2008. In 1990 he won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Special Visual Effects for his work on the television thriller By Dawn's Early Light, shared with Craig Barron, Michael Pangrazio, and Charlie Mullen. In 1996 he earned an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Special Visual Effects for his work on the television movie The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Attack of the Hawkmen, shared with Eric Chauvin.
Priot to his work for ILM, Mather worked as matte painter for the company Matte World on projects such as the drama Avalon (1990, with Craig Barron, Michael Pangrazio, Wade Childress, Christopher Evans, Rich McKay, and Krystyna Demkowicz), the comedy All I Want for Christmas (1991, with Frank Ordaz), Leaving Normal (1992), Far and Away (1992), Batman Returns (1992), Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992), A Far Off Place (1993), Ghost in the Machine (1993), and Maverick (1994).
For Industrial Light & Magic he worked as digital matte artist on Wolf (1994), Forrest Gump (1994), Congo (1995), Jumanji (1995), 101 Dalmatians (1996), Men in Black (1997), Contact (1997), Deep Impact (1998), Snake Eyes (1998), and Men in Black II (2002).
Other credits as matte artist include Space Cowboys (2000), Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), J.J. Abrams' Alias (2001, with Kevin Blank), The Majestic (2001), and Murder by Numbers (2002). In addition, Mather served as visual effects coordinator on Lethal Weapon 4 (1998) and as visual effects supervisor on the drama The Californians (2005).
More recent work as conceptual artist include The Polar Express (2004), Monster House (2006), and Beowulf (2007).