by Anthony Frajman
Looking back on the 25th anniversary of the seminal science-fiction feature The Matrix.
Another huge component of The Matrix was the groundbreaking work done by the team at Sydney-based VFX studio, Animal Logic, which would go on to work on Happy Feet, Peter Rabbit, Moulin Rouge and The LEGO Movie, to name a few.
It was the Zareh Nalbandian/Chris Godfrey founded studio, and a group of talented effects artists, who played a key part in developing and designing the Oscar-winning, ubiquitous Matrix Code and Matrix Rain effects. At the time, the company had yet to make a name for itself in Hollywood. Though it was relatively new (it was founded in 1991), Animal Logic had already worked on John Woo’s Face/Off, which also involved producer Barrie Osborne, and US director Gore Verbinski’s first feature, Mouse Hunt. “This was a really big step,” Nalbandian remembers. “It was the biggest visual effects film project we’d ever tackled. The scale of it was huge. But we had a really great depth of capability and technology, so we felt like we could rise to any challenge.”
As Nalbandian and many who worked on the VFX recall, much of the technology needed to do the effects had not even been invented, forcing the team to be innovative, and often invent the tools required by the project. “So many groundbreaking ideas had to be executed in the movie, whether it was morphing bullet time (one of many sequences executed by US based Manex VFX), or cascading The Matrix Code. There was just so much innovation that the Wachowskis and VFX Supervisor John Gaeta wanted to bring to the film, that we were able to deliver as one of the VFX companies on the movie,” Nalbandian says.
Justen Marshall, a junior employee and student at the time, who worked on The Matrix Code, and current employee at Animal Logic, recalls that “with a lot of the effects, no one knew how to do them.” Recalls Animal Logic VFX Supervisor Lynne Cartwright with a laugh: “We had programmers working full time writing code and we’d be trying that out and seeing if it did what we needed it to do.”
“Animal Logic has always been a company that wants to support creatives with technology,” adds Nalbandian. “If it doesn’t exist, we’ll build it. Everybody was always pushing each other, technology pushing creatives, creatives pushing technology. There’s the factor of being in Australia, where we are too far away from the world to have had some experiences, but if you don’t know what you don’t know, you’ll try anything.
“In those days, everything was bespoke. You just started with a blank slate and you solved the problem in front of you. Nowadays, you’ve got a thousand times as much power on your phone. I was writing shaders by hand, writing code. I wasn’t using anything to generate the shader. We were just trying different things and solving mathematical problems. A lot of that is still in place now and is part of our technological evolution… it’s part of Animal Logic’s own journey of pipeline development and automation.”
For Nalbandian, the project immediately fit Animal Logic’s philosophy, which was to find innovative strategies to tell filmmakers’ stories. “We did some pretty groundbreaking work in the early days of morphing, (like) Agent Smith changing from one form to another. We developed proprietary tech for that effect. There were some great technical challenges, but some great creative challenges as well. And then of course, when it won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects, it helped put Animal Logic on the feature film visual effects map.”
One of the most widely recognised achievements of Animal Logic was designing The Matrix Code, the effect many associate with the film, which is still everywhere today. “Simon Whiteley is the one who cracked it,” Nalbandian acknowledges. “And if I recall correctly, he found some characters in a Japanese cookbook, and showed that book to The Wachowskis, who responded very strongly. Simon then developed that further, so it was no longer really Japanese, and although it had that hint of the origin of the characters, he took it into a completely new and original place.”
For VFX Designer Whiteley, The Matrix Code was the culmination of a lifetime fascination with codes, language and characters. A fan of Beatrix Potter, he’d been writing his own versions of code since he was a child. He drew on that experience for The Matrix, and vividly remembers the famed effect coming together. “I’ve been interested in ciphers, codes, and strange languages like Tolkien’s elvish ever since I was a child, creating them and writing them into my own Mimlacode stories,” Whiteley recalls. “My partner happened to be Japanese, so I went home and began studying the different types of Japanese characters: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. I looked through her books, most of which happen to be cookbooks. I chose Katakana because of its clean simple strokes and began hand drawing the characters and introducing a few western numerals and symbols to move it away from normal Japanese writing. To give it a timeless quality, I asked Justen Marshall if he could program them to shoot across the screen like white hot stars with fading green trails to match the old P1 phosphor green monitor screens. This was shown to the Wachowskis, who liked the look but wanted to develop it further.”
“The Wachowskis had said that they wanted it to feel like rain falling down a window. We tried different versions and different ways of doing it, but once we got to the one that was used, it became pretty obvious”, Cartwright adds.
“I went home one evening and pulled out the cookbooks again, which are all printed from back to front, and right to left,” Whiteley recalls. “Then I noticed several of the recipes were also written top to bottom like traditional Japanese calligraphy. Our shooting stars would become falling stars. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that we are all made of stars. To make it appear like Neo and the Nebuchadnezzar were within the code looking out, I had Justen Marshall flip all the characters. Descending vertically, they felt too fast, so we slowed them down, and then they looked like digital rain on glass. Suddenly our code took on a life of its own. There was a melancholy to it, a sadness as if you were looking out from a window on a rainy day and you couldn’t go out and play”.
Like many of his colleagues, Nalbandian at the time did not realise how massive a phenomenon The Matrix Code would become. “Afterwards I thought, ‘What an amazing thing that every second screensaver in the world’s displaying the Matrix code [Laughs]’. And talk about Australia exporting popular culture to the world. It was quite an inspiring experience for me.”
“I didn’t see it as any different from any other job, really. It was just about getting the job done. We didn’t really know it was gonna be as big as it became”, Cartwright says.
“It proved that you could do [big Hollywood films] out of Sydney. You didn’t have to be in Hollywood. You didn’t have to be huge. It just came down to really clever people and great relationships. And I guess that’s what Animal Logic was built on over time: really clever, talented people and good relationships and being prepared to take on anything. That was the other attitude at Animal Logic: we can take on anything, and we can solve any problem. And that’s to the credit of people like Chris Godfrey and Lynn and Simon and Justen”, Nalbandian adds.
“Once any design creates an emotional response, you know that it works, but I never imagined it would be part of such a groundbreaking phenomenon,” Whiteley says. “Linking it to the cookbooks and sushi was pure accident; it reminded me of Deckard’s line in Blade Runner. It seemed like a fun job, but it didn’t feel like it would be world-changing. It was only when I was seeing the film and hearing people react to it and thinking, ‘Wow, I was involved in that’. People reference it in articles still… it’s amazing. You never really know, and that’s still true today when we’re working on movies.”
Reflects Mashall: “I have to put my picky hat on though when I see some of the screensavers, and I’m thinking ‘That’s not the right font!’ [Laughs] I stared at that font for years, and there are often characters in the screensavers that are not in the font, and there are characters in the font that are missing from the screensaver.”
The Matrix would win the Oscar for Best Visual Effects, along with three other Oscars, putting Animal Logic in huge demand by Hollywood. One of producer Andrew Mason’s favourite memories of making The Matrix was the first time that edited scenes from the film were shared with the entire crew. “About halfway through the shoot, at the studio, Zach [Staenberg, editor] and the cutting room put together a 15-minute reel because by then they’d shot a couple of the fight scenes,” Mason explains. “They stuck some kick-ass music and sound effects with it. We were having a serious party because the cast and crew had been working so hard on the film, and it seemed like a good moment to pump up the energy of the team. There was a screening room set up for looking at the film dailies, so that was used to project this long teaser, and groups of 30 or 40 would leave the party, go and look at that, and then come back into the party. During that process, the excitement was building as each group came back stunned, with comments like, ‘Oh my God, what are we doing? This is amazing’. By the end of that night, the entire cast and crew was just absolutely bananas, buzzing. That energised the rest of the shoot in a wonderful way. That was a hell of a good night.”
Recalls Whiteley: “We had watched as they were setting up the bullet time cameras and we’d seen what they were capable of. Then we were shown the marble lobby sequence with Neo and Trinity on wires, and we were all blown away. We knew we were part of something special.”
Looking back, Andrew Mason believes that The Matrix had a huge role in encouraging Hollywood production and VFX to come to Australia. In the years following, films like Mission: Impossible 2 would follow the path down under, and Warners would bring features Queen of the Damned, Scooby Doo, Kangaroo Jack and Red Planet (all of which involved Mason as an executive producer) to Australia. Other major blockbusters like Ghost Rider followed suit. “It kicked off a whole lot more possibilities for Australia, and it definitely made Australia an attractive offshore location for American productions. Doug Mitchell and George Miller [with the Mad Max films and then Babe and its sequel] and other international productions had been produced here. But it helped boost that, and kicked a lot of careers along.”
Adds Nalbandian: “It gave Hollywood Studios, particularly, confidence in the capabilities of Australian crews, and Australian visual effects companies like us. It opened a door for Australia to be considered on a level playing field with Hollywood and the rest of the world.”
“The Matrix is and always will be one of the greatest VFX movie franchises thanks to the foresight of its amazing directors, cast and crew,” says Simon Whiteley. “All the projects I have worked on are in some way intrinsically connected; they are woven together by a rainbow thread. The Matrix Code was designed and created in the same manner – for a specific purpose – to trigger an emotional response. It’s about compassion and empathy for the world around us and to save humanity from itself.”
The Matrix Code designer Simon Whiteley has launched his latest project, The Eirys Coeden, which draws on his experience working on The Matrix and several other projects. Details can be found here. The Matrix at 25 Part 1 can be found here. The Matrix at 25 Part 2 can be found here.
