Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1453602
8 cgw j a n u a r y • f e b r u a r y • m a r c h 2 0 2 2 WHAT WAS THE MOST TECHNICALLY CHALLENGING ASPECT OF THE FILM? Technically, it was solving the volumetric capture and the machine learning and AI that goes into that, for which we collaborat- ed with Volucap. But aesthetically, the split time was the most challenging — just to try to get the right emotional resonance from that moment, because it's a very pivotal scene as Neo fi st meets The Analyst, and The Analyst confronts him and shows the power he has over him. WHAT WAS THE MACHINE LEARNING USED FOR? It was used in a couple of notable areas. One is the scene with Niobe (a human from Zion), when we meet her in the real world; she is signifi antly older than Jada Pinkett Smith, the actress who plays her. So, we used some makeup, but we applied ma- chine learning on top of that to add some additional scarring and to actually replace her left ye, which, as the story goes, had been injured in a previous battle. But the main challenge came when shooting volumetric capture, when you have some big arrays of cameras that are all focused on a capture area, or in our case, it was mostly about an actor, and you put that all into the computer to analyze, and it re- builds what it understands of the character in that space. You can then choose where you want to put the camera later. Bullet time was a simplifi d version of that, a single track that you basically have to follow. Volu- metric capture offers much greater freedom of camera/performance/frame rates and, to some extent, lighting, aer the capture. Traditionally, those rigs are built in very cali- brated, refin d studios, where everything is known. We custom-built rigs that you could take in and operate like a normal camera, and do it alongside the normal cameras with the camera crew. That was done in conjunc- tion with Volucap, in Berlin. DID ANY OF THE EFFECTS REQUIRE NEW TECHNOLOGIES OR NEW TECHNIQUES? The one I just mentioned, the technology had to be figu ed out. We worked with Volu- cap, which had some aspects of volumetric capture already figu ed out, but we needed to apply it in a different way. We collaborat- ed with them to redesign the rigs and up- date how they processed things as a result. We did adapt some existing technologies in a slightly different way for the time-split scenes, too, where we utilized stereo rigs, which are used less frequently these days. But instead of having the cameras offset to create the left- and right- ye views, we actually aligned the cameras and shot them at different frame rates, so we basically acquired different frame rates of the same action simultaneously, enabling us to split those together and do it more as a split screen, rather than add CG into the process. However, we did use some CG to augment hair motion and so forth for the slow motion . ARE THERE A LOT OF CG CHARACTERS IN THIS FILM? In terms of hero characters in the real world, we have the fi e main Synthients that we encounter on the ship. We also meet some other Exomorphs and a number of more secondary characters beyond that. Plus, we have digital doubles for a number of our main characters in the Matrix. WHICH WAS THE MOST COMPLEX DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT? It would be between Machine City, which obviously looked familiar with the vast pod towers, but we kind of expanded the city. So, it's actually much larger in scale than during the earlier movies. And it's kind of over- grown, and pods are now stacked on top of one another. It has really become this very overgrown, almost diseased city. We also built out what we call the murky roots, which is the underneath, the lower mist layers, which are these thick, inter- twined pipes and tubes. And then IO, which is the cave area where the free minds live; that was also pretty vast in terms of an environment build. The living spaces were all kind of built into these stalagmites the size of skyscrapers that connect top to bottom in the cave. That en- vironment has its own kind of micro-atmo- sphere: clouds that gather at the top, and a simulated sort of bio-sky lighting system that illuminates the whole space. WERE ANY MINIATURES USED THIS TIME? The closest we came was building full-scale prosthetics for pieces of Neo and Trinity to represent when they are being reconstruct- ed. We built a kind of part-exposed skull, limbs, and a torso that we could film an The signature green Matrix code appears in a number of shots.