Muybridge & the Matrix 

or

How horses, "bullet-time" and a Japanese phonetic language are connected 

  Above is Eadweard Muybridge's famous 1877 film which finally settled the popular question of its' day - During a horse's gallop, are all four hooves ever off the ground?  Yes.

  Although it doesn't look like much by todays standards, it was the height of film technology in 1877. The technique is so emmulated that over 100 years later it was the basis for the "bullet-time" technique developed for the filming of The Matrix movie. With the major difference that Muybridge used 12 cameras at one  per  half second, and the "bullet-time" effect used hundreds of cameras at 12,000 frames per second.

  This finally answered the popular question of the day: Can a man duck bullets?  No.

  If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then both Muybridge and the Japanese were made quite happy. Does the imagery below look familiar. It is my take off from some simple Japanese Katakana text. All that crazy looking "matrix-computer-code" you see in the movie is Katakana.

  To produce the effect for the movie, Katakana was reversed and mirrored as above.

  So the next time you see some spectacular effect in a movie be assured that it is borrowing upon the hard work of techniques developed by others.

Emulation is a honor.

Below is the image I worked off of to create the "matrix" code.

The steps are:  (continued below)

1. mirror

2. negative image

3. gaussian blur

4. colorize

5. adjust hue saturation

6. jpeg artifact removal

7. digital noise removal

8. motion trail effect

If you made a really long image doing the same thing, then scrolled and captured it as a movie file, you would have your own custom matrix code.  

The phrase "Bullet Time," is a registered trademark of Warner Bros.

Pablo