MOVIE INTRUDER: THE MATRIX

Creating tools to crash your favorite movies

You might be wondering what we mean by "Movie Intruder". It means exactly what it sounds like: we take a movie and intrude it by changing the narrative and adding ourselves to the scene.
Why are we intruding our favorite movies? Well, it's fun. It is as simple as that. How? Virtual production. Just as simple.

We are developing a solution so that Virtual Production can reach its full potential. We create an environment, camera angles, lighting setup and save it to create a library of scenes that can be used by others without the hustle!

Watch the full "The Matrix : Movie Intruder" video here:

Pre-production

The idea of the story came to us when we started creating the environments. We were thinking in which moments or places we would like to be in. When you are asked in which place you would like to be added, you can't figure it out on the spot; there are infinite possibilities! After hard thinking we found out the answer: movies. We love movies, it is why we are creating lights, why we are all working together. So now we get to see the original movies with twists that WE come up with. How fun is that?

While our Unreal Engine artist Gert was re-creating the Matrix scene environment, we were focusing on the shots and the overall look. The shots are fairly simple so we just had to create as similar light setup and composition as possible. We tested and estimated the lenses that were used in the original Matrix movie, what format was the movie shot in. All of this is very necessary information to be able to copy the look.

We used a LED wall to showcase that it is possible to use our MONET setup for LED wall as well as green screen. And, honestly, we got an opportunity to shoot with a LED wall and we are not the team that would turn it down.

Important thing to note is set design. Yes, there are lights, a good camera and a virtual background, but to really make the scene immersive, lights need to be synced with the scene and the actor needs to interact with the environment - a chair, a glass; anything that he touches makes you wonder what on the set is real and what's, well... unreal. We chose to not have a real chair for Kaur, but to find a 3D module of it instead. The only physical things on set were the pills, the glass and Kaur himself.

VIRTUAL PRODUCTION

It is all about placement; we connect lights to the trackers and save their position. In this way, the next time we ( or you ) set this scene up, all you have to do is follow the instructions of the placement. Once everything is set, the lights can be controlled through our MONET app. They will sync with the environment and glue you into the shot. The LED screen is streaming an Unreal engine environment and we are ready to shoot!

The shoot is pretty fun, there is a lot of improvisation as the set is very flexible.
As it was interesting to test different scenarios, we made 3 versions of the same video - Kaur the biggest fan, Kaur the awkward Estonian and Kaur the drug addict. It fills your geeky heart to be able to see yourself in a movie. I think it's a beautiful thing - to have such high quality tools to make anything we want and we... make jokes.

POST PRODUCTION

Post production comes down to three things - isolating the subject from the background, adding actor in the shot, and fixing the color to match the shots perfectly.
The most complex shot is the reflection in the glasses. Some extra work is needed in post to create the right perspective and warp to sell the shot.
To match the sound, we added thunder and smoothed sound in and out for transition between Morpheus and Kaur speaking.

This is our first of many "Movie Intruder" series, we can't wait to share them with you. And we can't wait to see what all of our customers can do with this sort of technical power/ magic!
Which movie should we do next?

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