And the things are intertwined. All things. Just one or two weeks ago I bought a DVD-set containing the three Matrix-movies (see according ↑essay at ↑cyberpunkreview.com), The Animatrix, and a heap of so-called bonus-material. I carried the whole box to a friend—who happens to work for Oracle [sic!]—and during the last days, or nights, I found time to finally watch Reloaded and Revolutions in full, and five of the nine Animatrix-short-movies. Before I only had had a look upon the modding-relevant scenes of the sequels … have a look at theHunted’s fabulous rendition of ↵The Chateau. In respect to movies with me it’s quite analogous to what HairlessWookie once said about computergames: “I hardly play those games—I immediately start to mod them.”

Well, now last night I watched some bonus material of Revolutions and this morning I received an e-mail newsletter, telling me that the ↑CGSociety currently features an artist profile of ↑Andy Lomas. The profile by Barbara Robertson is called ↑Once a mathematician, always an artist—this indeed does justice to Mr. Lomas’ activities and career. Lomas was a ↵CGI supervisor for The Matrix Revolutions and worked on color and lighting for The Matrix Reloaded. For Revolutions he particularly worked on the rain system: “A system like that has to produce complexity. We had to create humongous amounts of rain using millions of particles. It’s a part of the craft that applies to the art I do.” The art he does was inspired by work done for Reloaded: “For The Matrix Reloaded, Jay Reynolds used a simple 2D version of the diffusion limited algorithm to produce an extra organic level for the black goop that swarmed over peoples’ faces when Agent Smith punched them. I created a variant on that aggregation.” The results meanwhile have made it to eight gallery exhibitions within one year, moving and still images of them can be seen at his homepage ↑andylomas.com.

“Although he can’t predict the results, he has honed his intuition. “You never know exactly what the structure will look like because the process of accumulation is random,” he says, “but you get intuitions and explore in various directions.”” Which again reminds me of ↵Edward Gordon Craig’s perfect actors and of a bunch of Orks leaving the combat theatre. I am speaking of New Line Cinema’s ↑LOTR movie trilogy: To create epic battle scenes on the fields of Mordor and Helms Deep, vast amounts of AI-controlled Orks were computer-generated. As I understand the matter, AI was necessary to get realistically looking mass-combat, and scripting each bot separately just was impossible. To the sheer astonishment of the people at the keyboards during one of the test-runs a bunch of Orks suddenly flocked together and headed straight away from where the action was. Perfect actors.
 


 

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