The uniqueness of the Oscar-winning visual effects in 1999’s The Matrix, particularly its signature “bullet time” effect, has become iconic, and so it’s not a surprise that two decades later, The Matrix Resurrections VFX supervisor Dan Glass experienced plenty of “fear and apprehension” over the planned fourth edition to the Wachowski siblings’ sci-fi classic.
“It’s clearly a continuation of the story and has a very high qualitative and aesthetic bar to hold up to,” he says of the new film, this time helmed solely by Lana Wachowski and again following Keanu Reeves as Neo. “The story is an evolution in the sense that it’s a newer version of the Matrix. … The need to upgrade was even present in the story. That said, Lana’s vision was that it should feel more real. The Matrix itself in the earlier movies was deliberately studio-based, very inspired by graphic novels. Lana wanted this rendition of the Matrix to feel more familiar to our real world. For her, that meant building off of some of the approaches that we’d followed on some of [the Wachowskis’] more recent projects, from Cloud Atlas to Sense8, where the style is almost shooting more like a documentary, [with] a lot of real locations. That was really the premise, actually trying to ground things in more reality.”
In all, the film’s 2,350 VFX shots — created by VFX studios DNEG, Framestore and One of Us — involved many types of effects. And, not surprisingly, how to handle The Matrix‘s iconic “bullet time” — and whether to include it at all — was a point of careful consideration. “How much are we gonna, you know, homage?” says Glass. “Lana felt that it was better not to try to copy ourselves that directly. You kind of risk losing the edge of being self-aware, which comes up [in the story].” Even the opening action scene featuring Carrie-Anne Moss’ Trinity — which takes viewers back to the first scene of the 1999 film — doesn’t include the bullet-time shot. “It will bring those memories back, but it’s not trying to replicate it exactly,” adds Glass.
For Resurrections, Glass explains, the team created “time split” segments as a new element. “The analyst [played by Neil Patrick Harris] uses bullet time on Neo,” says Glass. “He’s conscious, but he’s trapped in a slow-moving medium. He has the bullet-time power kind of used against him.”
Glass says that to develop a bullet-time-inspired look, the VFX team did some research and development and took inspiration from underwater photography. “We even built a test, shooting underwater with a big volumetric capture rig, which is a huge array of cameras, that basically then can be brought together with machine learning and artificial intelligence [to] reconstruct a scene so you can essentially move around. It’s like bullet time on steroids,” he says.
But he adds that it was used “delicately” and not for technology’s sake. “We used a lot of just stereo rigs to capture two frame rates [typically 24 and 120 frames per second] simultaneously. It’s still quite tricky because when you have the footage in different frame rates, the cameras are moving differently. It’s not as straightforward to the screen, but you can piece these elements together from different takes.
“They are basically composited together,” Glass elaborates, adding that, for instance, the sequence set in Tiffany’s (Trinity’s) workshop involved additional work. “We did do some CG hair to slightly add a kind of underwatery slowness to it and adjusted [Reeves’] coat fabric just to help sell the frozen or near-frozen motion. And obviously the bullet and the exploding apple — we shot a real apple at high speed. The rendition in there is CG, but it’s built upon something that we shot for reference.”
Glass adds that they also used 8 fps for select shots. “The analyst is a mix of 8-frame and 24-frame,” he explains.
He notes that the sparks in the background are “basically real, they’re basically processed, but they’re from slow-motion capture. And then, we extend the streaks. … We wanted this idea that sparks are moving really fast, but they have a really long trail.”
With VFX having evolved since 1999, the movie also includes more state-of-the-art CG character work. Take, for example, the “exomorph,” as Glass calls the digital rendition of Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Morpheus — in this installment, an evolved program. “It was quite tricky to get the right balance of this sort of fluidity and enough personality that you can feel the humanness in him,” he says, explaining that the actor appeared on set to film some of the scenes, wearing a performance capture suit and head cam for facial capture “so that we were capturing, real-time, in context, his movements and his facial expressions. It then drives a particle sim[ulation] that creates his look. But it was important to try to build it off his performance.”
The work also involved the expected digital-double moments — “Bugs (Jessica Henwick) jumping off of the roof is one big one in the opening scene.”
Additionally, some parts of the movie required de-aging of Reeves and Moss. “We created a de-aged CG head [for each] — we had the cyber scans of their heads and textures, CG models from the earlier movies archived, but they had to be upgraded and up-rezed to modern standards. And we very carefully ‘patched’ because we wanted to keep things like the mouth, teeth, eyes, which are so hard to reproduce digitally, and they’re really a core part of the performance. Those are retained from original photography, and then the rest of the face is just slight changes in bone structure and skin quality.”
This story first appeared in the Jan. 5 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.