The Making of "The Matrix"

Conventional cameras in the Matrix

Photography In The Movies

One of the hottest film of 2000 is without doubt the sci-fi kung-fu film "The Matrix". With such a name, you might be tempted to think that it's a film about Nikon's metering system. This show combined HongKong-styled kungfu cinematography with incredible digital effects, making it a novel combination.

What has this got to do with photography, you might ask ? If you have watched the movie, you would have seen the following three scenes:

1)At the beginning of the movie:

Watch for this scene near the beginning of the movie, where the female character Trinity leaped up in mid-air, was frozen momentarily as the camera revolved around her, and she unfreezes and delivers a potent kick to the cop.

2) Half-way through the movie:

The other scene was when Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) was dodging bullets on the rooftop of the building. The camera swivels around him as he bent backwards to dodge the bullets whizzing past him in slow motion.

3) Nearing the end of the movie:

As Neo desperately tries to shake off his agent pursuer, they got into a fight at a underground railway station. As they leaped towards each other firing their guns, the scene freezes and showed them frozen in mid-air, and the camera pans around them. This image below shows the pre-manipulated shot done in the studio.

How did they do it ?

Ordinary movie cameras can freeze scenes, but they cannot revolve around the subject when the scene is frozen. They could do it only when the subject is a stationary one, such as a lamppost or something immobile. In this case, because the subject was in full motion, the director couldn't use an ordinary still movie camera. For the three scenes, a special setup called the Flo-Mo (presumably for flow-motion) array was used. It consists of a circular-well, where 35mm SLR still-cameras are placed in the holes you see in the circular wall of the well. You can see the setup in the shot above, where the well is being painted in green for the computer to easily discriminate the subject from the background.

The actors stands in the middle where they performed the moves using wire setups by Hong Kong kungfu director Yuen Wo Ping, seeming to defy gravity. Up to 120 synchronized cameras snap their image at the very same instant, creating a 360 degrees view of the same moment. The image you see above is just one of the 120 images.

The film is processed, and the same frame from the 120 rolls of film were scanned and generated into a single continuous movie clip by computers, where the camera seemed to revolve around the "frozen in time" actor, to which the scene background is then added. Because of the green screen used in the setup, the computers can easily differentiate the actors from the background, "lift" them up digitally and place them in a real-life scene (eg. rooftop or railway scene). And because there are only a maximum of 120 actual frames, computers are used to develop "intermediate" frames between the real frames to make the action flow more smoothly, just like cartoon animation.

This technique was developed for scientific research for motion studies, and this is the first time it has been used in a movie production. And yes... Canon fans, the camera used was the American version of the Canon 5 without the Eye-Control Focusing (known as Canon EOS A2).

Remember, you heard about it first here at "Photography Happenings!!"

All images used on this page, including animated logo-image of title "The Matrix" are copyrighted property of Warner Brothers