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Cinema Tech |
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Bullet Time Technique
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By Abhishek Tiwari
In the film The Matrix (film by Warner
Bros.), there were many scenes where the character walks
up the wall defending himself from bullets and jumps up
in air to kick the opponent. During this jump the whole
seems to freeze and the shot pans around the character
as if we are walking around a statue to see how it looks
from different angles. Have you ever wondered how this
shoot was done? These types of shoots actually allow the
viewer to explore the action moment while orbiting
around the scene at normal speed.
The technique is known as Bullet time technique. The
character is actually lifted through cables while he
walks up the wall (the cables are of course edited out
of the scene). When the character is at the top of the
jump, a series of still and motion cameras (also called
rig setup) capture the scene at the same time. The
cameras are arranged on a track and aligned through
laser targeting system, forming a complex curve around
the character. |
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These two dimensional "slices" or the images of a
particular three dimensional moment are then viewed in a
sequence to produce an orbiting hyper slow motion action
which is been frozen in time. To cope up with the
problem of camera rigs, these stills are scanned and
enhanced by computers to get a real time view of the
scene. The computer generated "lead in" and "lead out"
slides are filled in between frames in sequence to get
an illusion of orbiting the scene. This method of
enhancing the bullet time is called interpolation.
If this action is to be shot at an extreme slow motion
then the cameras are to be triggered at extremely close
intervals, so the action continues to unfold. Also
dropping up and adding up of number of frames and their
frame rate are also arranged to speed up or speed down
the action.
This technique was initially used to display the
extremely slow or frozen moments of flying bullets. That
is why it is called bullet time technique. This
technique freezes the imperceptibly fast events and
gives a dramatic effect. Generally the whole shot is
taken against green screen or blue screen which is then
replaced by the actual background. This manipulating
method is called keying. |
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