Bullet time: Encyclopedia II - Bullet time - History

Bullet time - History

Long before the emergence of a technology permitting a live-action application, bullet-time as a concept was frequently developed in cel animation. One of the earliest examples is the shot at the end of the title sequence for the late-sixties japanese animated series Speed Racer: as Speed leaps from the Mach 5, he freezes in mid-jump, and then the camera does an arc shot from top to sideways. The most renowned anime example can be found in the cult classic Akira. In one scene, the telekinetically inclined antagonist, Tetsuo, dodges bullets as a camera orbits around him.

The first concrete example of bullet time can be found in the obscure 1981 action film Kill and Kill Again. It was also featured in Dario Argento's 1996 horror movie The Stendhal Syndrome (CGI, with a bullet) and the 1998 BBC documentary mini-series Intimate Universe: The Human Body. In 1994, Dayton Taylor invented a film-based system called TimeTrack that was used in many TV commercials [1]. The effect was also used in 1998's Blade and furthur developed in Blade II. Bullet time became popularized when John Gaeta and team expanded it temporally and into the digital arena through the incorporation of frame interpolation and image based CGI within the film The Matrix (1999) and through view-morphing techniques pioneered by the company BUF in music videos by Michel Gondry and commercials for, among others, The Gap. In 2003, Bullet Time evolved further through The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions with the introduction of high-definition computer-generated approaches like virtual cinematography and universal capture. Bullet time has been used in computer games such as Max Payne (2001), Max Payne 2 (2003) and Enter the Matrix (2003), and The Path of Neo (2005) where it would allow the player to slow down the game-world, but still allows the ability to look and aim at normal speed. One of the first computer games to feature the bullet time effect however was the 1999 game Requiem: Avenging Angel which featured angels fighting demons in a dystopian future.

Other early applications of the concept:

• Videoclip for Suede "The Wild Ones", 1994. Dir. Howard Greenhalgh. [2] [3]
• Videoclip for The Rolling Stones "Like a Rolling Stone", 1995. Dir. Michel Gondry. [4]
• Videoclip for Sting "Let Your Soul Be Your Pilot", 1996. Dir. Emmanual Carlier. [5]
• Videoclip for Smoke City "Underwater Love", 1996. Dir. Tim MacMillan [6]
• The movie Lost in Space feature a scene similar to bullet-time; when ship enters hyperspace all the action freezes but camera slightly arcs.
• The film Wing Commander (1999), which did poorly at the box office, though the trailer gained some notice for its inclusion of the film's bullet-time scene, showing people, and a spilling cup of liquid, captured in mid-air.
• Videoclip for Meat Beat Manifesto and title sequence for Howard Stern's televised radio program, both directed by Ben Stokes of the influential film/video/design consortium H-Gun
• Videoclip for Korn "Freak On A Leash", 1998.

Antecedents to bullet time occurred before the invention of cinema itself. Eadweard Muybridge used still cameras placed along a racetrack to take pictures of a galloping horse. Each camera was actuated by a taut string stretched across the track; as the horse galloped past, the camera shutters snapped, taking one frame at a time. (The original intent was to settle a debate the governor of California had started, as to whether or not all four of the animal's legs would leave the ground.) Muybridge later assembled the pictures into a rudimentary animation, by placing them on a glass disk which he spun in front of a light source. His zoopraxiscope was the direct inspiration for Thomas Edison's moving pictures. In effect, Muybridge had achieved the aesthetic opposite to The Matrix's bullet-time sequences; it may be a historical accident that no nineteenth-century bullet-time animations were made.

In addition to the multiple-cameras effect which captures the actors, the surrounding scenery in The Matrix's bullet-time shots is a computer-generated rendering. These scenes use the photogrammetric modeling and projective texture-mapping techniques pioneered in Paul Debevec's 1997 film The Campanile Movie. George Borshukov, a collaborator of Debevec, was on the team at Manex Visual Effects that created the bullet-time shots for The Matrix.

The phrase "Bullet Time," is a registered trademark of Warner Bros., the distributor of The Matrix. It was formerly a trademark of 3D Realms, producer of the Max Payne games.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki