Early 90's short film made up entirely of "bullet time" camera work [closed]

In the early 90's, at the San Francisco International Film Festival, I saw a short film that used the "bullet time" technique. This was way before The Matrix, which is often credited with "inventing" bullet time. I recall the short film being named "Wall", but I can't find anything about it online so it may have a different name.

The film consisted of a long shot of the front of a wide industrial building in sunshine. Techno music with a hard loud beat starts, and the camera "bullet times" around to one end of the building, looking down the front face of the building, and then "bullet times" around through an arc to the other end of the building, always with the center of the building in the middle of the frame. It "bullet timed" to the beat, very quickly. It looked like the building was dancing!

Then the camera returned to its long shot of the whole front face of the building and "bullet timed" up to the front doors, tilting up a little bit as it did, and "bullet timed" back out to the wide shot, still in time with the fast beat.

After doing both those "beats" for a while, the film abstracted the image more by showing a person's hand, against a white background, holding a series of photos. Each photo (one frame of film each) was a picture of the industrial building, from those same camera locations as the previous 2 "dancing building" shots, so it looked like the building was still dancing but within these jumpy handheld photos.

Does anyone know the correct name of that movie, or the year it came out, or have any links to it? It was pretty cool (and I'd like to be able to reference it in conversations about The Matrix).

identify-this-movie short-films

Best Answer

The Wall, by Takashi Ito, 1987.

Screened at the SFIFF in 1989 as Part of Shorts in a Feature Length World.

I've never heard of this film before I read your post, but I love short films and problem solving.

Using the website for the San Francisco International Film Festival and searching the films of the past festivals with the word "Wall", I found this, which was really close to your description, and then I had a director's name, "Takashi Ito".

I used his name and "Wall" to further research, and the most I could find about this director (in the Roman alphabet) came from this webpage, and sure enough, there were other stills of the film that further matched the memories you shared with us.

Then I found it on Youku. The link on top of my answer is a direct link to this short film on YouKu (with lots of ads, sorry!), on the right-side of which are other of Ito's films. I also found out about a DVD of his works, that I might end up getting because I find this director's work interesting (although the film Wall isn't on there it seems).

I confirm that this is stop motion and not bullet-time, and that you could reproduce the effects in this film using your own digital camera.

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What movies have used bullet time?

The term "bullet time" was first used with reference to the 1999 film The Matrix, and later in reference to the slow motion effects in the 2001 video game Max Payne. In the years since the introduction of the term via the Matrix films it has become a commonly applied expression in popular culture.

Who invented the bullet time effect?

Eadweard Muybridge 1887 British born Eadweard Muybridge back in 1887 created a series of animations using 6 or more cameras around naked men. The cameras as you can see were fired at the same time around the men, capturing their movement in mid air. This is true bullet time and is the same way we do it today.

How was Matrix bullet time filmed?

For the most famous iteration of bullet-time in The Matrix, where Neo dodges bullets on a rooftop, the set-up involved 120 still cameras and two film cameras. Placing the cameras close together was imperative to create the illusion of motion, as each camera only captured a single still photo.

Did The Matrix create bullet time?

So what is bullet time? It's a visual effect, also known as the Matrix effect or time-slice, created using multiple cameras to give the impression of time slowing down or standing still altogether. The term \u201cbullet time\u201d was first used in the original script of the 1999 film The Matrix.

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