"We had 200 5K Skypans on dimmers just for the TransLight," Garside adds. "In addition, we had 500 Par cans in the roof — again, aimed through a light gridcloth sail — to create some ambience over the helicopter. We also had to light into the helicopter, so we had four Dinos coming through 12' by 12' frames of light gridcloth, which I put on scissor lifts because the helicopter was suspended 20' above the stage floor. Finally, I had five more Dinos outfitted with narrow-spot bulbs [NSP] and rigged in the perms to give us highlights through the building's windows. The windows, incidentally, were also tinted, so when they were blown out, it gave the feel of light flooding in as they shattered. We then had to light the inside of the room, which we did with several Wall-O-Lites. Since the sprinklers come on, we built our own housings for the Wall-O-Lites: Hydroflex Kino Flo tubes clipped to reflector backings to make water-safe 8-bank and 4-bank units. Then we used those units through layers of light gridcloth."
"As a last element for the lighting in this scene," expands Pope, "I wanted to create the effect of sunlight strobing over the actors' heads due to the helicopter's twirling rotor blades, even though the blades would be added to the scene later with CG. To do that, I had two 70K Lightning Strikes units which were run through a precision fader to allow us to control the amount of strobe flashing in relation to the camera's specific frame rate. We aimed those at the actors from above. We first tried Unilux units, but the Lightning Strikes fixtures were much brighter.
"Because Neo blasts out the building's windows with a mini-gun aboard the helicopter," Pope explains, "the effects people [Brian Cox and Steve Courtley] had to create a pattern of bullet-hit effects, but they couldn't squib the glass because we'd have been able to see the wires. In front of and above the glass, they rigged hundreds of mortars that projected sand hard enough to shatter the window in a predetermined pattern. The walls in the room, as well as the people, were also squibbed in that same pattern. The water then had to come pouring out of the broken windows — all in one shot.
"We were shooting over Keanu's shoulder from inside the helicopter," Pope continues, "so we saw all of this happening in front of us as he fired the mini-gun. It was incredibly complicated stuff. In fact, we had to stage it twice, because on the first take, we could see the sand pass through the air before it hit the glass. To hide it, we flagged off some of the lights overhead — which was tricky, because we still needed to light up the front of the building as if it was daytime."
With the building's windows shot out, Morpheus makes a dramatic leap to the helicopter and freedom; he's barely caught by Neo, who dives from the helicopter after his falling friend. Suspended by a cable from the now-crippled chopper, Neo and Morpheus careen through the downtown buildings while Trinity looks for a rooftop to set the heroes down safely. "Most of this work was performed by the second unit from the ground, and the helicopter unit from an additional camera-helicopter," notes Pope. "For some key shots, Carrie-Anne actually learned to pilot the 'copter. For the shot in which Neo and Morpheus are dropped onto a rooftop, a large stunt crane was constructed on the highest part of a multilevel rooftop, about 20 stories above the street. We used the crane to swing the stuntmen onto the lower levels of the roof."
Once Neo and Morpheus are safely grounded, the helicopter loses control and dives into the side of the building. "When the helicopter crashes," reveals Larry, "we see it exploding behind them in an almost supersonic wave that blasts out the building's windows — it's like a time-lapse shot of a flower opening."
"The helicopter crash was the type of elaborate sequence where storyboards are invaluable," explains Pope. "No shot in the sequence is a simple shot of reality. Many background motion picture and still plates had to be shot, from helicopters, window-washing units, and other buildings. A quarter-scale chroma-key green building was then erected — which was made of squibbed glass — that the effects people shattered in the 'expanding ring' pattern as the helicopter mockup was swung into the building on a specially-built crane arm."
Subterranean Brawl
"After Morpheus is freed, the trio is pursued down into a subway by the Agents," Pope explains. "Everybody manages to get out, however, except Neo. This is where Neo and the main villain, Agent Smith [Hugo Weaving], have their big showdown fight."
Like the previous sets, the subway had to be lit for both normal and high-speed photography. "Inside the station, the platform area had 8-square-foot ceiling sections, each of which had a fluorescent fixture built into them," Garside notes. "Above each of these sections were 72 Par cans. The built-in fixtures were actually hollow, and we just aimed the Par cans down through them, angling them in such a way that the illumination felt like fluorescent light. When we were shooting at normal speeds, we had maybe 12 Par cans coming though each fake fixture, which were covered with 1000H. For high-speed work, we rigged the set so that each of the ceiling sections could be lifted out and replaced with 8' by 8' frames of light gridcloth; increasing the light value but not changing the quality of the light that much."
"Because our sets were alternately lit to a T2.8 or a T11," says Pope, "all of the practicals had to be built so that they could accommodate both lighting levels. Many had to be specially made out of a heat-resistant resin. The [normal and slow-motion] shots don't match perfectly all the time, but it's close enough that the average viewer won't notice any difference. When you work for a long time at T2.8 and then suddenly shoot at T11, it's easy to make a mistake. At that level of light, you have to trust your meter more than your eye."
A Brighter Tomorrow
Interestingly, 150 show prints of The Matrix were treated to Technicolor's renewed dye-transfer "matricies" process. (See "Soup du Jour" AC Nov '98.) The remaining 4,350 release prints were struck on Kodak's new Vision stock.
Pope has nothing but praise for his Australian crew: "Reggie and his crew and key grip Ray Brown and all of his team worked incredibly hard on this film. They were solid as rocks and rose to any challenge. When I first laid out all of the lighting and physical requirements for this film, they said, 'You're kidding!' But when they realized I wasn't, they said, 'Well okay, let's do it!'"
The Wachowskis are equally enthusiastic about their director of photography, stating, "Bill Pope is the kind of cinematographer who really enjoys using black on the screen. There's a certain [compositional] power in having deep, dark blacks. But beyond that, Bill also likes moving the camera, which we enjoy doing very much. Those two elements fit really well into the way we wanted to make our movie."
