The Wachowski brothers, the directors of "The Matrix," are masters of technology, with the first episode featuring "Bullet Time," which has since been parodied in numerous movies; the second episode, "Reloaded," takes the Wachowski brothers' imagination to the next level. In a climactic fight scene called "The Bad Fight," Neo takes on hundreds of Smiths. Only one of the hundreds of Smiths is a real person, and the stunts are so realistic that the fake Smiths have different facial expressions and different hair styles!
"Bullet Time"
The classic "Bullet Time" scenes (Neo leaning back to dodge a bullet, Trinity leaping out of nowhere to rotate 360 degrees) are now so well known that although only two or three actors are on screen, the time is so short that it's not possible to see them all. Although there are only two or three actors on the screen, and the time is only a few seconds, but in order to shoot this shot from the pre-preparation to post-computer processing but spent a few months of time.
The so-called "bullet time" refers to the fact that the camera rotates rapidly around the subject while he or she remains almost stationary. The footage actually utilizes multiple cameras, which are then fed into a computer to process and animate the bullet's flight. Few people realize that what makes "bullet time" so cool is the fact that Gaita, the special effects director on "The Matrix," is using a technique that was used more than 100 years ago, when photography first appeared.
In the mid-19th century, shortly after the invention of the silver-plate photogrammetry method, a mapmaker named Lasserdat innovated by tying a camera to a kite and flying it over Paris, photographing the ground from different angles, and then converting these flat images into three-dimensional topographical maps through a series of operations, a method that came to be known as "photogrammetry. This method came to be known as "photogrammetry.
Gaeta developed the technique for use in "The Matrix," in which the scene was filmed with 122 stationary cameras surrounding it, mimicking a camera that could move at any speed. But since the cameras were set up around the perimeter, one camera could easily be captured by the others. So they also needed to use computers to generate virtual scenes so that the images from those cameras could be removed in the post-production process.
"Bad Fight" takes it to the next level
And indeed, making a "Bad Fight"
sequence was a lot harder than "Bullet Time". "The scene depicts Neo and Agent Smith arriving in the courtyard, talking to each other for a few moments, and then starting a fight. As Neo now kung fu greatly increased, Agent Smith saw that he was going to lose, and hastened to change, turned out hundreds of doubles and Neo against the fight. If the first episode of "The Matrix" fight scene is a "kung fu sonata", then "fight" this scene can be said to be "symphony". When Neo and Agent Smith walk into the courtyard, they are real actors. But after the fight, everyone and everything in the scene is computer-generated. That even includes camera movement - the camera moves at an incredible 200 miles per hour - a high speed that would be enough to quarter any real camera.
The first step in "moving" real objects into the virtual world is to take precise measurements of everything that appears in the frame. To convert a small-scale city block, the CG artists had to find architectural blueprints for each building and convert them into wireframe structures. The special-effects team's approach was radically different, feeding as much real-world data into the computer as possible, a method also known as "image-based conversion.
To show Neo and more than 100 Agents Smiths fighting with their bare hands, the old way of doing things could have taken years of post-production. Now, special effects designers are "pasting" digitally synthesized facial images onto the heads of stand-ins. As the two actors sit on the stage, they are filmed by five Sony digital cameras, which are sampled with incredible precision - up to 1G of data per second! All the data is stored uncompressed on the massive hard drive of a top-of-the-line computer.
In this way, the series of facial expressions of Agents Smith and Neo -- every movement of facial muscles and skin -- were faithfully recorded. For the director, this means that once a scene has been captured, the cinematographer can move the virtual camera at will to capture the actors at any angle, in a variety of camera positions -- either pushing the camera in close for a close-up of the actors or pulling it back for a panorama, as he or she pleases.
Hardcore fans will surely play this scene over and over again on DVDs in the future, but even if they press the pause button furiously, they won't see anything coming. The digitally synthesized faces of Neo and Agent Smith will stand up to the scrutiny of even the most discerning fan, and the digitally synthesized backdrops of the buildings look as old and dirty as the real city. This is the magic of virtual cinematography.