Firstly, for those who ask, ‘the guy’ shooting the gun is my old best pal “Dave” :) (I’m the one behind the camera lens :)
This is a video I made a while ago when I was learning how to do special effects.
Obviously inspired by the whole Matrix bullet time sequence I thought it was a good case study project to see if I could figure out how to do something ‘similar’.
I bought the gun from a local toy store (I was living in Cyprus at the time) and sprayed it black. The actual video (original plate) was shot using a dolly track system that I made with poles and some inline skate wheels. I think I did around 50 takes to get the right pull back speed and focus racking while ‘dollying’ all at the same time. Was super tricky, but great practice.
Anyway, the hollow point bullet was modelled using 3DS Max lathe and some bump mapping. I used the video from the original plate as the environment map for the bullet texture and reflectivity maps.
Next was the particle effects which I created using Particle Illusion, which was so massively basic back then but it kinda did the general job for flames / sparks and smoke.
Sound production was a reasonable effort here, I think there ended up being around 30+ sound effects just to make up this short sequence alone.
Trickiest bit was matching the rotation in 3D space around the bullet model render to the actual pan action of the camera move I performed in the original plate.
I had a whole scene planned after that shot but got distracted so never finished it but thought i’d upload it as part of my portfolio anyway :)
