Matrix Jedi

• Special Effects
  
• Props
  
• Production Stills
  
• Story Boards
  
• The Script
  

Special Effects

Processing the footage into a film was done with Adobe Premier, but only after a lot of processing. Video provides up to 60 frames per second. Darel wrote a custom program to change the video frame rate to 24 frames per second, to duplicate the frame rate of film and give the video its clean film look. This same program was used to generate slow motion and faster motion effects. By using all the frames from the video, but playing it back at 24 frames per second, you get slow motion.

Darel is a real genius at writing graphics code. Using a development tool called CodeWarrior (by Metrowerks, writing in C, Darel developed software to generate most of the special effects seen in Matrix Jedi. Other effects were done by manually editing frames, the equivalent of creating lasers by scratching the emulsion on film (ah, those were the days!).

THE LIGHTSABER

Lightsabers in video has become commonplace. Darel has an excellent explanation of the technique on his web site, although this is not how it was done here. Darel has written a custom application that simplifies the process immensely.

THE JUMP

The Jump is a basic bluescreen shot. First, we filmed a lock-down shot on the roof that comprises most of the scene. Then we filmed Jim running toward the edge of the building and actually jumping. Even jumping from a safe distance, we lost a pair of sunglasses that way. For the rest of the jump, we filmed Jim in front of a bluescreen. The effect of his coat flying up was done simply by attaching fishing line to his coat tails and pulling it up. These frames were then overlayed over the static footage from the rooftop. The shadow moving across the ground and across the face of the building were manually added frame by frame.

Darel considers the roof top scene where Bin sees multiple Agents then they disappear bit by bit as Bin puts on his sunglasses one of, if not the, hardest scene to produce because it required a lot of frame by frame editing.

Multiple shots of Darel were filmed with the camera on a tripod. Darel moved around the roof top striking menacing poses in various positions. In one of them, Jim raised the sunglasses until they covered the camera lens.

The multiple sequences were then laid on top of each other one frame at a time. Darel had to "erase" holes in the layers so that all the agents would show through, then he erased the parts of the Agent that were covered by the sunglasses. The segment with the sunglasses is over 120 frames.

ENTRY FROM PHONES

This effect is basically just fading in Jim and Brandy as they step away from the phones, then adding a bunch of crawling blue lines over their bodies. The hard part is (1) making the blue lines appear only over Jim and Brandy, and (2) making the blue lines seem to curve around their bodies kinda.

1. The clip was exported from Premiere as a sequence of numbered stills, then each still was opened in Photoshop (LE) and manually traced with the polygonal lasso tool to create a collection of white-on-black masks. You can view a movie of those masks by clicking here. The masks quiver a lot, and that looks bad, but when they are used to mask the blue crawling lines, the flaw becomes much less noticeable.

2. A custom program was used to generate a large number of randomly positioned, randomly angled, crawling blue lines, and mask them onto the fade-up sequence using the white-on-black masks. However, the resulting effect looked too "flat", so we decided that it had to appear to curve around the subjects' bodies.



The above illustration shows how that is done. Each point in the target image would normally just be tested against each of the crawling blue lines to see if it needs to be blue. But instead we will distort the position of each test point first. In the diagram, the black dot represents a typical test point inside the mask (the grey area). The area inside the black circle is scanned, and the average X,Y distance of mask points is calculated -- represented here by the black arrow. This vector is reversed (as depicted by the red arrow), and the point it lands on (the pink dot) is used as our test point, instead of the black dot. This has the effect of squeezing the lines in at the edge of the masks, more severely where the vector is strongest (near the edge of the mask), and less so for points which are further from the edge of the mask. Points which are nowhere near the edge of the mask (the blue dot, for example) are not effected because the vector averages to 0,0.