Você define bullet time como slow bullet dodging, ou o efeito spinny de múltiplas câmeras em um arco?
Há uma cena em câmera lenta no primeiro filme Blade , onde você pode ver as balas se movendo pelo ar, dando ao alvo tempo suficiente para reagir e sair do caminho. Blade foi lançado em 1998, um ano antes The Matrix .
Está na cena em Chinatown, onde Deacon Frost capturou uma menina, por volta de 2m45 neste YouTube clipe (desculpe, é em 4: 3 squashovision).
O efeito slow-spinny pode ser encontrado em Lost in Space (também 1998) quando eles entram em hyperdrive (por volta de 1m20s neste clip ).
Não é um filme, mas um efeito semelhante ao tempo da bala The Matrix pode ser visto no videoclipe de Michel Gondry para The Rolling Stones Como uma Rolling Stone .
Também digno de nota (mas não um filme em massa), O filme do Campanile :
"a short film directed by Paul Debevec made in the spring of 1997 that used image-based modeling and rendering techniques from his Ph.D. thesis to create photorealistic virtual cinematography of the UC Berkeley campus."
"When I saw Debevec's movie, I knew that was the path."
-- Visual Effects Supervisor John Gaeta, WIRED 11.05.Campanile project Master's student George Borshukov was hired by Manex Entertainment where he and his colleagues applied the Campanile Movie's virtual cinematography techniques to create some of the most memorable shots in the 1999 movie The Matrix.
O artigo Fiado vinculado sobre Matriz refere-se a ambos destes:
Fast-forward to the early 1990s, when another Frenchman, Arnauld Lamorlette, the R&D director for design firm BUF Compagnie, faced a problem similar to Laussedat's. Industrial clients examining buildings for structural flaws needed to see Paris from above. Parisian airspace, however, is tightly controlled; nonmilitary aircraft may fly over the city only on Bastille Day. Lamorlette found that by morphing between two photographs, he could generate a 3-D model: digital photogrammetry. BUF employed the technique to help director Michel Gondry create a music video for the Rolling Stones. Its radical camera moves - zipping through a room full of partygoers frozen in midmotion - caused a sensation in Europe. (BUF also used this method to make a Gap ad called "Khakis Swing" that was most Americans' first glimpse of the effect.)
Gaeta and Kim Libreri pumped up this technique for The Matrix: By triggering a circular array of 122 still cameras in sequence, they were able to simulate the action of a variable-speed movie camera that tracked completely around its subject. Because the cameras located on one side of the array were visible to those on the other side, however, they also needed a way to computer-generate photo-realistic sets so they could paint the cameras out of the frame.
Gaeta found the answer in 1997, at the annual visual effects convention Siggraph, where he saw a short film by Paul Debevec, George Borshukov, and Yizhou Yu called The Campanile Movie. The film - a flyover of the UC Berkeley campus - was generated entirely from still photographs. Like the 19th-century cartographers, Debevec and his team derived the precise shapes and contours of the landscape by triangulating the visual information in still photographs. Then they generated 3-D models based on this geometry, but instead of applying computer-generated textures to the models, they wrapped them with photographs of the buildings themselves. The trick worked spectacularly well. Instead of resembling something out of Toy Story, the buildings and the surrounding hills in The Campanile Movie looked absolutely real.
E aqui está o anúncio da lacuna de 1998 "Khaki Swing"