Toshiba's "timesculpture" ad is bullet time meets Feist, or something equally impressive
By Paul Miller 
posted November 11th 2008 10:18PM
posted November 11th 2008 10:18PM
posted November 11th 2008 10:18PM
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"Vareint"? Really, man? Come on.
Well, yes. They vareed it quite a bit from the original effect.
Anyone else find it odd that a company that's touting their great upscaling technology still felt the need to shoot their commercial for their upscaling technology, in actual 1080 HD, rather than standard definition and then upscaling it?
Hmmm.
No one is asserting that their upscaled SD is anywhere comparable to true HD footage.
remind anyone of the 'street spirit' video radiohead made 13 years ago???
Props to you for seeing that as well, but it's a completely different version of the same idea.
Before the 360 shot, we had double exposure. We could slow one frame rate and speed another.
This commercial is the same thing, but with 200 cameras instead of one, and apparently 20TB of storage. Wowsers.
Martin Arnold would be proud.
Put a dark lens over your left eye and you can watch it in 3D.
(Pulfrich Effect)
Wow! That actually kinda worked
as i need most peaceful life along with this world within our capacity we should all
be happy among future carrier of life.
*head explodes*
Looks like a modern interpretation of Salvador Dali and Philippe Halsman's surreal motion photography... Nice!
Nice one, but does it really promotes Toshiba's computers? not sure.
my comments at http://www.commentino.com/orim
Actually, they used an array of film SLRs to film the bullet time sequences.
This should be evident from the behind-the-scenes video, but also from the state of technology at the time.
The Matrix was released on March 31, 1999. This was after the advent of the first DSLR (Kodak DCS100, 1991, http://www.nikonweb.com/dcs100/ ) but before the introduction of the first powerful, mainstream DSLR (Nikon D1, June 15 1999, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikon_D1 ). No digital camera available before 1999 would have had sufficient resolution for the task---but 35mm film, well... it sure _sounds_ like a film they use in the movie industry... oh wait... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/35mm_film
(He doesn't wear leather...)
Now that is awesome.
Anyone find a the-making-of that commercial ?
bah, gondry did it first, and did it better. no, not that gondry, his brother, oliver 'twist' gondry:
http://www.partizan.us/musicvideos/og/tiga.html
youtube for the quicktime impared:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=VySphrQsy1U
Yes, the brother of the brother of the gondry you were thinking of (er... well michel gondry, actually) did it first:
http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=3SdlAXq45VY
and he did it ... twice:
http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=mh9QaX_KRZ0
So please, can anyone stop referencing this effect as the "Matrix bullet time effect" ?
Even Gondry is not the first one to use this effect, since it comes from a french artist (I can't remember his name, though) who shot himself this way while receiving loads of water upon the head...
And please, beside the huge tech performance, there is absolutely no fresh idea in this commercial.
Like Photon209 said, the artist from poland Zbig Rybczynski even received an academy award in '83 for his short movie "Tango"which has certainly been extremely inspiring.
Why do publicist never assume the source of their idea ?
They really are empty minded.
the artist I was refering to is emmanule Carlier (http://www.biennale-de-lyon.org/bac1995/eng/carlier.htm) who formerly used this kind of shooting technique for the art biennale of Lyon in 1995.
Really cool ad.If you like this you will like the opening credits of the new james bond movie.
Crystal Castles are amazing, they are massive in Ireland and the UK.
in the famous Matrix bullet time scene there is a major bug:
Neo drops the gun to the floor, but when the camera goes around the guns disappear. as he falls to the floor, the guns appear again :)
Another CSS song in a commercial.
No, that would be Crystal Castles :)
Did you see the gorilla walk through the middle?
Those two fools throwing paint on everyone else deserve to be punched in the mouth. Nobody throws pain in this house.
Anyone know who did the ending voice over for that commercial?
Definitely appreciate the work that went into it, but I probably won't be able to watch it many times and still find it fascinating, as with the bravia commercials.
Can you imagine the mess they made after shooting the ad? I mean, that paint spilling and those... black rectangles? I don't envy their janitor.
Meh.
Maybe it's still just early, but I can't help but feel terribly UNimpressed by that. It just strikes me as incredibly corny for some reason. I think it might be the "it looked cool in the Matrix the first time around but not so much any more regardless of how much you spend on it" type of effect. I'm sure there must've been a better way to phrase that.
Now, throw in some Fallout 3 VATS, some exploding limbs, and maybe I'll enjoy it. Yeah, that's what it needs--violence.
Looks like a combination of Zbigniew Rybczynski's "Tango" and bullet time. I suspect the bouncing balls are a reference to "Tango", actually.
Cool!
Neo does not wear a leather jacket in any of the Matrix films.
It's actually reminiscent of a Salvidor Dali piece:
http://viceroyforlife.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/5-salvador-dali21.jpg
What an awesome commercial. I am trying to imagine how they actually created this without editing out the other cameras in the other angles, then again, I know very little about cameras or filming. Anyone know of a link that explains the technology of this a little better?
Cool effect, but I still hate hipsters.
I'll admit the technology is pretty cool. Now would it kill them to actually film something interesting? Oooh! Look at that man throwing a bucket of paint! Look at that man swinging a flag! How original!
That was annoying and pointless. Is it 1999 again?
Cool. Too bad their TVs are garbage.
I'm surprised no one mentioned the GAP ad that preceded The Matrix and featured (really, as I understand it, pioneered) live-action bullet time. Here's the ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knW1hGwmEXQ
I'm surprised nobody's brought up the video for Roni Size's "Brown Paper Bag" yet, which seems to have been an inspiration for the back-and-forth scrubbing effect:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4n0iUtWEwY
I just watched the Roni size promopeople are referring to, and although nice, it is nowhere near as intricate as this. Making a video loop with footage shot from a single fixed camera is child's play, and compositing another element into the scene is reasonably straightforward too. Doing it with footage shot on 200 consumer cameras however is a completely different story. I heard that they had to custom-make the rig, the circuitry to trigger the cameras, and even write bespoke computer scripts to pull the relevant frames from the inconceivably massive 20TB of data. Now that is serious commitment to art.