A note on the Bullet Time scene in Matrix 1999

photo by Entertainment Weekly, http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,702023,00.html
the scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhxbYTMNMxo

The Bullet Time Effect is an advanced and strangely magnetizing technique of freezing the moment,which mixes the techniques of strobe flash photography, slow motion and time lapse. The most known scene displaying the technique is the famous bullet scene from the movie Matrix where several different techniques of capturing time is applied: the high speed photography used for shooting the motion of the bullets coming towards Neo; slow motion to make Neo’s fall more visible; and again high speed photography to unite the frames attained from cameras installed around the actor to create effect of camera revolving around Neo.

“In The Matrix, the camera path was pre-designed using computer-generated visualizations as a guide. Cameras were arranged, behind a green or blue screen, on a track and aligned through a laser targeting system, forming a complex curve through space. The cameras were then triggered at extremely close intervals, so the action continued to unfold, in extreme slow-motion, while the viewpoint moved. Additionally, the individual frames were scanned for computer processing. Using sophisticated interpolation software, extra frames could be inserted to slow down the action further and improve the fluidity of the movement (especially the frame rate of the images); frames could also be dropped to speed up the action.”[1]

What is so interesting about the Bullet Time Effect is that, it does not only slows down the motion to a perceptible degree, but also allows the audience to see the object and the environment in motion from different perspectives as a three dimensional reality. With the bullet time effect, the audience is made to revolve around the object in space, and this revolutionary technique may only be compared to walking around a sculpture in real life. Moreover, The Matrix Bullet Time is an important example how the visual perception is shaped through popular visual culture by different techniques of time and freezing the moment.

The aim of the Bullet Time scene in Matrix is to make the motion of different objects simultaneously visible from as many perspectives as possible. With the use of effects of time mentioned above, condensed motion hidden in a few seconds is revealed to the extent that there is nothing left for the mind to dream about. Flaxman states that “Deleuze distinguishes cinematographic movement from these other arts because the latter are essentially "immobile in themselves so that it is the mind that has to 'make' movement."[2] In cinema, on the other hand, the movement is there as it is in real life and therefore, the mind only follows the motion on the screen. The Bullet Time scene, however, in that sense goes beyond what Deleuze calls the movement-image; the audience does not have to imagine any motion mentally but even a single five-seconds-long scene is visually and mentally very demanding because of the complexity of notion although it is all in slow motion. While the over-exposure of motion creates a strange excitement due to the over-stimulation of visual perception, it is also exhausting, difficult to perceive and difficult to remember. In the Bullet time scene, the mystery of stillness in a single frame in photography is replaced by the pleasure of seeing the imperceptible as a moving image. The scene is a good example on how Hollywood cinema develops and incorporates strategies of stillness and slowness in itself to produce new forms of the movement-image.
[1] Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Time

[2] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 156, quoted in Flaxman, Brain is the Screen, 18-19.
Elif Gül Tirben, from the thesis draft.