PRODUC T I ON . THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS
Production Fact File
AWARDS The film received a Bafta nom for VFX in 2021
EASTER EGG VFX pioneer John Gaeta appears as an extra in the crowd
CO-LAB DNEG was
supported by One of Us and Framestore to create a total of 2350 VFX shots
FOETUS FIELDS Evans’ favourite sequence to work on, however, was the foetus fields. “I loved it because, to me, that is The Matrix – being able to recreate and evolve the imagery of that environment is something I’ll never forget.” For anyone that hasn’t seen The Matrix (we assume nobody reading this magazine), the foetus fields are mass units from which synthetically grown humans are gathered and transferred by harvester
machines to the power plant once older humans die. The foetuses are preserved in their pods by machines with tentacles, while the harvesters maintain the fields; attacking intruders and disposing of dead foetuses into waste funnels, which feed into the human cities’ drainage systems. “Obviously, we had a perfect reference for the VFX from the previous movies – and even restored some of the original assets, which were a challenge to find, get back online and then make usable with modern-day tools,” explain Evans. “We asked around at the various companies that had worked on the assets at the time, and some of them had backups, but we didn’t get a full set of stuff. Oddly, not all The Matrix assets were in one place, and some of them were just stored on the artists’ home computers.” DNEG was able to get a harvester, a doc bot, a sentinel, foetus egg and stalk, then use these as a base to recreate the foetus fields with modern topology. To create the tower stacks, the team started referencing, just by eye, the pod in the original film. They then recreated that in good detail and added connecting cables and additional gubbins to hark back to the first film – still, Wachowski was keen to evolve it.
Did you know? Flashbacks from the movie required de-aging for Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss. “We shot them at their current age and gathered photographs from the trilogy archive to create cyber scans of their heads and textures,” says Evans. These scans were then carefully patched together – since the scenes included close-ups of the characters, Aharon Bourland, who oversaw the de-aging process, couldn’t rely fully on CG to make it convincing. “It was decided that the hard-to- digitally-reproduce features, such as the mouth, teeth and eyes should be captured on camera. Then, the rest of the face is just slight changes in bone structure and skin quality.”
“She wanted the machines to feel more organic, almost as if they were fungus growing onto extra pods to acquire more power. You’ll notice they’re less straight and ordered, and are wedged in
HARDWARE See (above) how DNEG use an exercise ball as a carrier for sensors before creating the familiar pods
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