- After the war, he moved to California armed with a reference from the head of Bell Labs to Douglas Shearer, sound director and the de facto head of R&D at MGM. He worked in movie production as a design engineer, field engineer, and systems engineer.
- He was a special-effects pioneer in blue- and green-screen compositing. His work made possible some of the special effects seen in Mary Poppins (1964), Ben-Hur (1959), The Birds (1963), and some of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films.
- He showed an early interest in electronics and ham radio. He received his engineering degree from the University of California (Berkeley). During WWII, he worked as a designer at Douglas Aircraft, and later as a radar engineer at Bell Laboratories.
- Father of Paul Vlahos.
- Son of Greek immigrants.
- Vlahos had more than 35 patents for camera crane motor controls, screen brightness meters, safe squib systems, cabling designs and junction boxes, projection screens, optical sound tracks and even sonar. He created analog and digital hardware and software versions of Ultimatte. As a result, every green- or blue-screen shot today employs variants of the Vlahos technique.
- Vlahos' achievements also include his work on sodium and color difference traveling matte systems. His version of the sodium system was used on dozens of Disney films, including Mary Poppins, The Love Bug (1969) and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) and was borrowed by Alfred Hitchcock for The Birds (1963) and by Warren Beatty for Dick Tracy (1990). Vlahos developed the color difference system (the perfected blue-screen system) for Ben-Hur (1959) and such scenes as its legendary chariot race. It was used in hundreds of films, including the first Star Wars trilogy and the Indiana Jones films.
- Vlahos was honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences many times, starting with a Scientific and Technical Award in 1960 for a camera flicker indicating device. He earned an Oscar statuette in 1964 for color traveling matte composite cinematography and another in 1994 for the Ultimatte electronic blue-screen compositing process, the first of its kind. He received the Medal of Commendation in 1992 and the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, an Oscar statuette, in 1993.
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