Hard to describe what I mean because I can’t remember specifically who’s done them, but I’ve seen quite a few over the past few months. They usually involve the camera panning across a scene (like one of them was in a living room during a party, and it showed somebody spilling their drink, and I think there was a dog in it somewhere). But anyway, they have a sort of “3D” effect without glasses, where some objects seem to be closer than others. If you’ve seen them, you probably know what I mean.
Google is failing me because I don’t know what to call them. But they’ve been turning up more often lately and I’d like to know how they’re done–is a different sort of camera used, is it some special-effects trick, or what?
Sorry for being so vague. I hope somebody knows what I’m talking about.
Do you mean 3D like in the Matrix, during the subway fight scene between Neo and Smith, where the camera sort of pans all around them and you can see them from all these angles?
Hmm…Yeah, I guess that’s similar (I just watched the scene on YouTube–it’s been awhile since I saw The Matrix). The one thing I remember for sure about one of the commercials is that somebody spills a drink and it flies out in slow motion so you can see all the globules of liquid, and the camera moves around it so it seems very 3D-like. I wish I could find an example of it.
What I remember reading when The Matrix came out is that there is an array of cameras around the scene filming it from many different angles. Computers then sew the bits together.
Although it got named “bullet time” for the scenes in *The Matrix *the first mass media use of it was in 1998 for a now famous commercial, Gap Swing (which also started a short-lived Swing music revival). Was the first time I remember seeing it, so I always refer to the effect as “freeze frame pan”. Not as catchy though…
The main effect is bullet time, but I’ve also seen (don’t know if this is what the OP is referring to) an effect where it looks as if the scene is frozen in time, but someone is walking through the scene in regular motion, interacting with the “frozen” parts. It’s cool.
Correct. A hundred stills cameras arranged around in a circle or spiral or whatever, all take a picture at the same single moment, and then those images are played back continuously like regular film, making it look like you’re flying around an object frozen in time.
Yeah, that’s it! I think what I’m talking about is a combination of this and the slow-mo “bullet time” thing. The effect is very much 3D without the 3D glasses. Sounds like the multi-camera explanation is what I’m trying to get at–and I can see why not many commercials do it (stylistic concerns notwithstanding) because I’d imagine that many cameras synced up have got to be pretty expensive to set up.
It was originally done using a whole bunch of cameras, but like with all effects, it’s gotten more and more computerized with time. Probably most of the time you see it now, the entire frozen scene is computer-generated.
There’s one in particular that I love. It was one of the NOVAs with Brian Greene. He dropped a glass of wine onto a table, and it shattered in slow motion, then stopped while the pieces were in mid air. Each piece had a little arrow showing the direction that the piece was travelling. Then he got in there and with his finger, reversed the directions of the arrows.
The scenes where the person is actually walking amongst the frozen freeze-frame is definitely totally CGI. And although The Matrix also composited & tweaked the shots together via computers, I’m pretty sure that the team that first came up with the process (and did it for The Gap ad) didn’t use any computers. I seem to remember they built a custom rig which consisted of a long strip of film mounted in a big arc around the object and a camera which could do a very fast pan via a mirror or beam splitter. If you watch that old Gap commercial the shot is pretty rough around the edges, like a practical effect.
I remember that - but it’s not quite bullet time. The effect starts at about 1:28 in this clip, and it looks like 100% CGI with the actor’s faces composited on the models. And the scene is static, as well; the Matrix had the characters moving whilst the camera tracked them. I wonder if the people who did The Matrix saw Lost in Space, and thought “that looks good - but we can do better”? Having said that, I suspect that everybody who saw Lost in Space left the cinema thinking that they could do better. I mean, it wasn’t bad, it was just a bit naff. And I distinctly remember the cinema I saw it in bursting into laughter when Matt LeBlanc first appeared. He gets a big reveal where he walks through a door, which is supposed to show him as a big space hero, but he has a silly grin on his face and looks like Matt LeBlanc, so it doesn’t work. Mimi Rogers looked nice in that space suit. The daughter sounded as if she had been smoking her entire life.
On a related topic, have there been any fundamentally new whizzy effects gimmicks since then? CGI seems to have rendered this kind of thing… if not exactly boring, then mundane, because you can do almost literally everything with CGI nowadays. Bullet time was clever because it was a mixture of practical and computer animation, and other clever effects from the past (slit-scan, split-screen, stop motion, the “zoom in and dolly back” shot etc) weren’t just subsets of CGI.
In fact a shufty on Google throws up this feature from the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World, from 1993! They called it time-slicing back then, and it was analogue. It actually looks just like the clever effect used by Cabaret Voltaire in the video for Sensoria, where they put a camera on a weighted crane (presumably on the end of a long pole, or something). That was 1984. If only they’d had computers back then, they could have ruled the world.
The first time I saw it was a couple of years before The Matrix (John Gaeta, by the way, is a pretentious arrogant dick) when I saw an image of a welder, with sparks thrown up. I can’t find it, but it was on a documentary similar to the Tomorrow’s World clip above.
In the Matrix, the scene is analogue but the bullet is CGI, as the real thing is too fast and too dangerous.
And Bullet time is not the same as the frozen time effect. Bullet time uses cameras that go off sequentially, thus capturing movement.
Finally, people walking through a BT or frozen pan scene is not that hard to do with basic compositing. You just need the traditional BT and a computer controlled camera to exactly mimic the shot in a green room (a room with all sides greenscreened.
