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wow
you still got it
like riding a bike they say
the matrix posits this idea of photo
real and immersive technology blurring
the line so that we can't discern what
is real and what is artificial welcome
to the matrix
kind of at an inflection point now with
the unreal engine you can get much
closer to the idea of the matrix than
one could do in film do you know about
this yeah
it's all supposed to be a little
unreal we're at a point where a modern
video game console can generate the kind
of imagery that we generated on the
movie 20 years ago but in real time
interactively in front of your eyes you
know it always used to be you'd have the
script and then you'd have the
storyboard and then you did the previews
and then you would film it everything
would be filmed against the green screen
and then ultimately a year and a half
later you would start to see your shots
get turned into something what's your
servant and now you can do stuff in the
unreal engine and render it out in real
time
it really feels like filmmaking is still
in the dinosaur age i'm ready everybody
twenty years ago we asked ourselves how
long it would be before faces and bodies
could be changed as easily as we change
clothes this demo was unique in that we
actually got keanu reeves we got carrie
and moss and they shot footage for us
with lana wachowski
lon is such a great writer so she wrote
this great little story between wow
keanu and i you still got it lana loves
anything that pushes the envelope so she
was totally into it the whole idea
behind this demo was to question what is
real and we actually have a few shots of
keanu right next to keanu digitally
recreate it hi
i'm keanu reeves we're asking you do you
know which version is real i sometimes
miss this version of us
me too and then the really exciting part
was we wanted to bring neo and trinity
back to life real time aside de-aging is
like one of the hardest things to do and
it's like piano is different he doesn't
look exactly the same as he did 20 years
ago you know we're like oh god we need
we need a reference ken was like hey
lana we got i got some files for you to
look at and it was a bunch of files from
matrix reloaded we basically de-archived
all the digital photography the scanning
the performance that keanu gave for the
matrix reloaded and we're able to use
that to help build the young version of
piano that we have in this demo
the hell are you doing back there
sorry i was told this is a sim preparing
me to fight the system
right on we wanted to play a character
and we didn't feel that it was right for
the player to play neo a trinity we
wanted the player to feel that they're
going on this journey with their idols
we have a system called metahuman so
metahumans is our digital human creation
system and the first exemplary character
that we put out was this character ada i
am a metahuman and we're like well why
don't we just take ada and give her a
matrix costume and you know because
we're all so well connected from making
the first movies i just you know i
emailed kim barra and i'm like hey kim
we have this demo we need a costume we
need a costume for our principal
character in this do you want you want
to come up with a costume so it's
authentically matrix i found up a whole
lot of old pen and ink drawings from the
very first matrix which i'd kept
they were nothing that we used they were
all like old stuff and so i kind of
fished those out and started doing stuff
based on some of them she brought back
ed natividad who's one of the concept
painters from the original movie and he
basically did a paint over on our
character and we're like okay that's our
character we called her io and you look
at the posters that we made from the
digital characters and it looks just
like they've come out of a matrix
reloaded photo session
from the very beginning of the project
we knew that we wanted to create
something
that expanded on some of these ideas
from the matrix and there was this mega
city in the matrix when we designed the
city we decided to pick some of the most
beautiful building with a lot of
intricate shapes and usually that's
something that is a bit scary when you
have to do something in real time
because it takes a lot of polygon and it
takes a lot of computer power to
generate that much detail everywhere and
that's where ninite or technology of
virtual geometry come into play
virtualized geometry means you don't
have to create levels of detail anymore
you just create a high-res model and you
put it in the game so the engine behind
the scene figures out exactly how much
detail we should see and the artist
doesn't have to worry about that on the
back end you're not going to have
modelers sit down and model every
building every window every window frame
you have some typical styles that the
artists like and then you put variations
through a procedural system and then
houdini takes over and builds up all the
buildings and even side roads are built
based on a rule so you don't have to
draw every road even so that whole city
gets built up by just a few major
arteries that are drawn by the artists
so it's a small team is building up this
huge city in the original trilogy
grids and things that are sort of
mathematical feeling were subliminally
intertwined in a lot of things so for
awakens we wanted to have that feel
again we didn't want to look completely
like a naturally grown organic city we
wanted it to look like something that
would have grown in the matrix something
that machines would have put together
and that was something that lana had
asked us to do to make sure that a
little bit of that pattern was visible
so we're basically designing the city as
a four kilometer by four kilometer and
then we designed it two main downtown
and then we created a large freeway to
connect those two downtown together it
kind of reminds us of the freeway chase
that we have in the matrix 2 movie
in terms of the camera work we use the
original matrix trilogy as a reference
and the one beat that we spent the most
time looking at was the matrix we loaded
car chase it was very important for us
to keep the same language of camera that
we saw in the original matrix we were
looking at how the theme the chase for
example and how much the camera is
actually shaking inside the car and we
want to make sure that that's the same
amount of shake
and then when it comes to the lighting
same idea we wanted to make sure we are
close to the movies so we have lumen
which is global illumination meaning
that it's real-time lighting and it
actually works like light behaves in the
real world for example we put a sun into
the world the sun lights up the road the
road then bounces that light back and we
get nice lighting that actually looks
like it does in the real world and then
obviously you cover everything with the
green that matrix is famous for the
mindset was all about let's shoot this
thing like lana would have shot it but
going faster
we got some actors on a stage we blocked
it out i put them in a car i drove them
down the street i put cameras on that
and we did a cut and turned it around to
lana very quickly to say okay what do
you think and we iterated on that and
then the best part is once you have
found the place where you want to do the
action you spawn the car into the world
you grab one of the controller and then
you play the car and then you start to
drive in those streets and then once you
record it that you can do two or three
times maybe there's a better
acceleration here or maybe you can drift
around here and when you're happy with
the action you can lock that action and
then refine and place your camera around
that stunt so it was easy for me to be
able to put a camera on something and
get all the beautiful final picture in
camera if i put a camera on keanu and
he's talking in a car driving 70 miles
an hour i can move the camera around i
can change focus just like a live-action
dp would have it's pretty mind-blowing
what just happened
i think a big part of it too is just the
pacing of it
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finding that pace finding that edit
making it feel more like
we've gone like another click above what
we did in matrix reloaded with crazy
amounts of agents and cars ramming each
other and flying up in the air so all of
that is simulated every time you play
that in the demo it is different because
it's using mathematics and physics and
particle effects and explosions it's
chaos it's a fractal physics system it's
called chaos all programmed in a way to
behave as close as we could do to the
way that you would look in a movie and
being in the action and it worked
because the first time that
people are playing it you drive i'll
shoot and they realize that they have
control and it's interactive but it
looks exactly like the thing that they
were just watching before that's the aha
moment people are like wait wait wait
wait wait i can play this this is crazy
it's just absolutely remarkable that
unreal 5 is capable of producing
something that feels real and
exquisitely detailed down to the most
minute detail this is something we never
had no one has ever had something like
this this is new
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you