Remember that first kick Trinity does in The Matrix (back before The Wachowski Brothers made two sequels so bad they travel back in time and make the first film horrible)? Regardless of these later sins against film, that one moment is awesome.
The “bullet time” or “flow mo” Matrix effects work by having a series of synced cameras, and morphing from one to the other. If you use movie cameras (many just use still cameras), you get a matrix of perspectives in time and space, that you can move through in several dimensions.
So why not take that one step further, and make whole walls of cameras? What I envision here is something like plasterboard (sheetrock) with embedded cameras, and connectors at the edges. The apertures could be as small as pin pricks, virtually invisible, so the walls could be used as general set components. Given that you’d have lots of cameras, you could get by with small apertures and limited pixels, since you could reconstruct images from several nearby cameras on the backend.
Once every surface of the set is a camera, you could do very dramatic movements through the time and space of a set, along a multitude of paths.
One has to wonder whether Matrix’s flow mo will look cheap in a few years, like the once-awesome morphing in Terminator 2.
Contributed by Rob Smith
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