hat is the Matrix? No one knows better than visual effects wizards Dan Glass and D.J. Des Jardin. For the past three years, the two have been building and perfecting virtual worlds beyond imagining for the highly anticipated sequels The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. Under the supervision of effects guru John Gaeta, Glass and Des Jardin have pushed the boundaries of what it is possible to achieve in the realm of digital effects and CGI technology.
From the outset, the team's duties were divided into two separate arenas: the "real world"—a dark future in which humans are enslaved by machines—and "the Matrix"—a computer simulation designed to imitate the present-day world we know. Glass, who supervised the effects for such diverse features as Thirteen Ghosts, Sleepy Hollow and both Mission Impossible films, was responsible for the all of the digitally enhanced elements within the Matrix. Meanwhile, Des Jardin, whose resume includes Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, supervised the creation of the real world.
Just a few days after completing the final effects shots for Reloaded, which opens May 15, Glass and Des Jardin took some time to speak with Science Fiction Weekly about their work on both films.
Can you talk about how the visual-effects department was divided for the two films and what each of you is working on?
Glass: Basically, the scale and the ambition of these pictures has been so huge on the visual-effects side that there are actually three supervisors on the production. John Gaeta, who's the overall creative head and director and brain—obviously he worked on the first film—heads up the department. And then he employed two supervisors to kind of share the workload and assist him in achieving it all. That's myself and D.J. And we split the work actually by content. I handle everything that's in the Matrix—so all the sort of superhero, kung-fu material. And D.J. looks after everything in the real world—all the tunnels and sewers and that kind of grimy reality, if you like. So that's kind of how it breaks down.
Des Jardin: Our main job on the real-world team is we've got a lot of heavy action once the action kind of moves into arenas beyond the Matrix itself. So we just have to use everything we can to make this world cohesive, because the only thing you can really photograph is the immediate foreground or the immediate character interaction area. And in some cases it's really immediate, like it's just the character, and everything else is something that we have to create, either completely digitally, as in CG backgrounds and things like that, or CG effects, or just integrating other effects that we've shot, or miniatures and so forth. We did a lot of that. Some of it's on display in Reloaded as establishing pieces, and then you'll get another whole use out of it for Revolutions.
It's kind of ironic that the real world has more science-fiction elements, while the world of the Matrix is actually more realistic.
Des Jardin: We used to kid each other about that all the time. There are a lot of things you can photograph for the world of the Matrix, and there is almost nothing you can photograph for the real world. So most of the time we had a lot of sets, actually large sets, for the characters to interact in, but they are, of course, surrounded by a lot of green screen. But Dan and I sort of split the idea between the real world using green screen and the Matrix world using blue screen, simply because of the fact that the Matrix world is sort of green-shifted—all the set design and all the costumes and stuff are sort of green-shifted—so it's better to use a blue screen behind that, and then everything in the real world is going to have a bit of a blue tone to it or more earth tones or whatever, so we used a green screen.
How did you go about expanding on the world originally created in The Matrix?
Glass: Pretty much everything has been amped up, as you might expect. We haven't rested on any laurels or let any of the effects or techniques that we used in the first film simply get repeated. We've refined everything.
Des Jardin: All the stuff that you're familiar with real-world-wise is represented in this movie. And the thing that we're expanding upon is, it's not just ships and tunnels anymore. You actually get to see where they go when they're not out roaming through the pipelines. You get to go to Zion, basically, and see where the last human city is. That's probably the biggest change, real-world-wise. And then it gets expanded even further in Revolutions.
Did you base the design of Zion on anything that already exists?
Des Jardin: Actually, you're the first person to ask me that, and there is an intentional design to that. ... You remember in the first movie, the power towers that all the pods affixed to when Neo wakes up? Remember it's sort of like a cylinder, and they're on the outside of that? The city of Zion is the inverse of that. It's like a big hole in the ground, and the apartments are on the inside circumference of the hole. And then the thing that's different is, there's a big core down the center, which is a huge elevator shaft that can take you from the top to the bottom, and there are many walkways that come off of that and can go to the perimeter, which is where all the apartments are. ... In other words, if you look straight out, well, you'll actually see the core, you won't see straight across, but you can see other apartments that stretch around, and that's what you'll see during a lot of dialogue scenes in Reloaded.
What kind of technological advances and impovements have been made since the first Matrix came out?
Des Jardin: It's more a case of using existing technology and then pushing it to the next level. What's going on in these movies is that we've established a lot of rules for what makes this universe work, and now we have to use all these amazing techniques to make that world that much more believable. So you won't see bullet time presented the same way that it was in the first movie.
Glass: In a practical sense, bullet time—which is the set up with all of the still camera rigs—is quite a cumbersome procedure. You have to do a lot of very careful planning before you shoot. You have to set up this massive array of cameras, and once it's shot you're pretty much locked into your camera path and speed and so on, because that's what you've recorded. The directors wanted more freedom than that this time. They wanted to be able to see a piece of fight choreography, for instance, repeat actions on that and then decide how they wanted the camera to move, and play with time in a much more flexible way so that they could focus on one aspect of it at extremely slow motion and then pull out and whip around it at another speed.
That's something we've never seen before.
Glass: No. Not really, because of what you need to pull it off. We create these virtual backgrounds—which have been used a great deal in these movies, and they look stunning—which are basically photographs of sets, or cities in other cases, and basically mapped onto geometry, which can be relatively simple because the photographs contain a lot of the detail, the finer detail that you need to see. And then with those you can move your camera reasonably freely, and it all looks fantastic and photoreal because it's based on real photographs.
What's the hardest thing you've had to do visually so far?
Des Jardin: Get enough green screen to cover stage one [laughs].
Glass: It sort of depends on what aspect. I think overall that making digital humans look totally convincing on a big screen was probably one of the biggest challenges, but then there are many other examples of these massive environments that had to look convincing, and at the same time we've done some of the most advanced fluid dynamic simulations for generating fire and clouds and the light that also have to hold up to quite long shots and pay close attention to the detail going on. So there's been a huge amount of research work that we've put into these.
Des Jardin: There's nothing that any of us have shied away from in terms of a challenge. I think that's what's been really good about the project. It's pushed everybody. So nobody's there to say, "Nope, sorry, can't do it." Everybody's there to go, "Yeah, how can we figure this out and do it? We've got heavy atmosphere in the tunnels that's going to take forever to render. Okay, how can we make it faster? How can we get it?" Because it was sort of a cheat in the first movie. We wanted to do it for real so that you see ships flying through it, sentinels flying through it and it reacts to what's being passed through it, and it looks good. That's just one of a myriad number of problems that we had to deal with. But everyone sort of rose to the challenge and kind of came through and that's, I think, what's very satisfying about it. And like I said, nobody shied away from it. So therefore I can't answer that question very well. Obviously, one thing wasn't going to be more difficult than the others.
Are there advantages to doing these two films back to back?
Des Jardin: Once you have the environment, you can do things within that environment. That's sort of the basis of how we handled Reloaded and how we're handling Revolutions. Reloaded is the movie that got us to build everything that we were going to need to use very heavily in Revolutions. So what we were doing in Reloaded is making sure that we have these environments. We have to create them. There's a level of detail to them, and we sort of figure out what all our layers and all our elements are. And sure, you're going to reuse bits and pieces of those as you keep going back to these environments, but just to do it once is the effort. And that's what Reloaded is all about. Okay, here you get a tour of this stuff, and then [in] Revolutions we're going to learn more about it and use even more stuff. But at least we have this foundation.
Glass: Inevitably, a major focus has been on Reloaded the last few months, but work on Revolutions has been ongoing for most of the time that we've been working on Reloaded. ... We get a bit of a reprieve, having delivered part of it. When we delivered the game back in January there was a bit of a relief there because it was one part that we no longer had to worry about. Having Reloaded just delivered, that's another huge relief.
Did you do a lot of preproduction work on the films as well?
Des Jardin: I can never say enough about the design phase of these movies, because it had a long preproduction time and a lot of movies don't get that. And I'm telling you that it really makes a difference between a good movie and a really great movie, because that design process is so important to the consistency and the character of the thing. It really shows. And you'll see it. You'll see it in the Matrix, you'll see it in the real world. There's some very strong visual themes running through everything. It's very good. And it also makes communication easy. When you're trying to talk to facilities and other supervisors that you have to deal with that maybe have never ever see this stuff before, you give them a folder that you've been working on for a couple of years. It's like, "Here's two years' worth of consistent ideas." That's a really powerful tool to get this stuff done. Very helpful.
How many total visual effects shots did you create for the two films?
Glass: In Reloaded there were 1,135 visual effects shots. ... Editing is not totally finished yet [on Revolutions] and that will affect things, but somewhere around 800 I think.
What do you think of the final product?
Glass: I love it, which is great, because when everyone has worked so hard on something you really hope always that the film will be enjoyable at the end of the day, and not every film I've worked on I've been able to say that. But certainly on this it's very, very fulfilling to see it come together. In a way, the role of a supervisor is to constantly try to keep in mind how the shot fits into the wider picture. You don't want to get too focused on the individualities, because that may not make sense across the scene or the moment in the film.
Des Jardin: It's fantastic. There's no doubt about it. It's very dense visually and idea-wise. And I mean that in as good a way as possible. You're getting many levels of entertainment and information and story, and I think that's something a lot of films lack nowadays, and I think because of that people will really have a good time with it. It'll be a really good extension from the first movie.
hat is the Matrix? No one knows better than visual effects wizards Dan Glass and D.J. Des Jardin. For the past three years, the two have been building and perfecting virtual worlds beyond imagining for the highly anticipated sequels The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. Under the supervision of effects guru John Gaeta, Glass and Des Jardin have pushed the boundaries of what it is possible to achieve in the realm of digital effects and CGI technology.
Glass: It sort of depends on what aspect. I think overall that making digital humans look totally convincing on a big screen was probably one of the biggest challenges, but then there are many other examples of these massive environments that had to look convincing, and at the same time we've done some of the most advanced fluid dynamic simulations for generating fire and clouds and the light that also have to hold up to quite long shots and pay close attention to the detail going on. So there's been a huge amount of research work that we've put into these.
Des Jardin: There's nothing that any of us have shied away from in terms of a challenge. I think that's what's been really good about the project. It's pushed everybody. So nobody's there to say, "Nope, sorry, can't do it." Everybody's there to go, "Yeah, how can we figure this out and do it? We've got heavy atmosphere in the tunnels that's going to take forever to render. Okay, how can we make it faster? How can we get it?" Because it was sort of a cheat in the first movie. We wanted to do it for real so that you see ships flying through it, sentinels flying through it and it reacts to what's being passed through it, and it looks good. That's just one of a myriad number of problems that we had to deal with. But everyone sort of rose to the challenge and kind of came through and that's, I think, what's very satisfying about it. And like I said, nobody shied away from it. So therefore I can't answer that question very well. Obviously, one thing wasn't going to be more difficult than the others.
Glass: I love it, which is great, because when everyone has worked so hard on something you really hope always that the film will be enjoyable at the end of the day, and not every film I've worked on I've been able to say that. But certainly on this it's very, very fulfilling to see it come together. In a way, the role of a supervisor is to constantly try to keep in mind how the shot fits into the wider picture. You don't want to get too focused on the individualities, because that may not make sense across the scene or the moment in the film.
Des Jardin: It's fantastic. There's no doubt about it. It's very dense visually and idea-wise. And I mean that in as good a way as possible. You're getting many levels of entertainment and information and story, and I think that's something a lot of films lack nowadays, and I think because of that people will really have a good time with it. It'll be a really good extension from the first movie.
