In the two weeks after the Super Bowl, "The Matrix" released posters of the main characters one after another. The posters were completely based on Duke's idea. In addition to being "cool to the point of being shit", there are also some cyberpunk culture displays. By March, Warner Bros., in conjunction with Silicon Valley and related forum websites, held a cyberpunk culture exhibition in San Diego, and released the first official trailer of "The Matrix" at the exhibition.

What is another major characteristic of "The Matrix" besides cool? It is definitely not philosophical thinking and mysticism, but a summary of the development of cyberpunk culture to the present. It is conceivable that such a trailer highlighting cool and cyberpunk can cause a sensation in this group.

Strictly speaking, Duke had the idea that it was cooler and more fun than "The Matrix", and even many things in the original film could be changed into dazzling futuristic settings, but whether it was filming or post-production, Duke only made some changes to a certain extent, rather than overturning it all over again.

Any film has its own style, Duke is very clear about this. Even the most successful hodgepodge of "Avengers" has actually quite a distinct style. The coolness and cyberpunk of "The Matrix" are the most distinctive marks. It will be helpful to add some futuristic elements on this basis, but if too much is added and affects the overall style of the film, it will be a disaster.

A pure hodgepodge film may not fail completely, but it will definitely not be able to achieve great success. For example, Jos Whedon, who is good at bringing various elements into a unified style, has fully proved this.

Making a popular science fiction film into a fan-oriented film is actually a failure. Moreover, after experiencing the great success of "Avengers", the subsequent sequels seem to be getting closer to this aspect. This directly leads to the sequel being far worse than expected.

Cyberpunk has its own black trait, and Duke will definitely not add some inexplicable things, especially beautiful scenery, to destroy this trait.

If a video has no style, or the style is not clear, the possibility of failure is higher than the possibility of success.

Don't forget. It's only 1998 now, and it's not the era when visual effects can be bombarded.

The Cyberpunk Culture Exhibition, which lasted for a week, attracted the attention of a large number of young enthusiasts across the United States. Warner's media and NBC TV stations also conducted concentrated reports on this exhibition, with the most mentioned "The Matrix".

Even this exhibition attracted some big shots in the computer industry, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who appeared one after another, to a certain extent, further aggravated the status of this cyberpunk culture exhibition in the minds of computer and computer network enthusiasts.

Then, the poster of "The Matrix" was spreading rapidly throughout North America with the fastest speed and with theaters as the fulcrum. The first trailer also quickly landed on all media platforms that can play videos, telling all viewers that the new film of the King of Summer Times is about to come.

After the cooperation with Warner is deeper, the biggest advantage is that Duke does not need to pay any attention to publicity, distribution and theaters. In addition to a series of actions in North America, Warner Bros. also cooperates with major sponsors of the film to actively carry out promotion work in the main overseas ticket markets.

Warner is in charge of the publicity, and Duke's main task is to complete the post-production of "The Matrix" with quality and quantity.

The big ship that is rampant around the world has opened a new era of movie special effects. Duke compresses actor expenses and strives for the largest amount of tax incentives from Australia in order to invest more funds in special effects production. Although "The Matrix" may not reach the limit of special effects production, it must create extremely cool visual effects.

A film invests $20 million in special effects and $40 million in the end, and the final effect is definitely a gap between heaven and earth.

Special effects can be said to be another major reason for the success of "The Matrix". As for the philosophical thinking that is highly praised by professionals, it must be in a very back position. Moreover, the failure of the last two films, especially the last one, actually shows what kind of bad consequences will be brought if some of the seasonings in commercial films are turned into a regular meal.

The two sequels of the film strengthen the film's unique personality based on the original work, especially the most confusing dialogue and philosophical thinking, making the plot far exceed the thinking limit that mainstream audiences can bear. The originally extremely exciting visual effects did not receive the ideal effect, which directly led to the film's box office performance being far inferior to expectations.

As Duke said, this is a science fiction commercial film that goes straight to the summer season. Some things are enough to touch them slightly. If you really want to discuss them in depth like art films, such a huge investment scale will definitely not be afforded.

In the past few months of post-production, Duke still uses his usual sharp editing style. After several years of cooperation, Mike Dawson cooperated with him. These tasks are relatively easy, and the most troublesome and time-consuming is the visual effects that are mainly designed by Industrial Light and Magic.

Under Duke's suggestion, the special effects components of Industrial Light and Magic were divided into three parts, partly specializing in the ordinary special effects parts, partly making and synthesizing bullet time about Neo and Smith, and the last part was to use computer technology to modify several scenes of gunfighting.

If you want to be cool and impactful, it is not just Charlize Theron who can show off his sexy figure and cool face. There will inevitably be some shortcomings when shooting, but the increasingly powerful CGI technology is enough to make up for the shortcomings of shooting.

Of course, there are also mechas, squid army and Zion that will not appear in the film. "The Matrix" is only two hours long, and if it is stuffed too much, it can only become a hodgepodge.

The video cannot be successful by stuffing some future things into it.

The most typical thing is that the greater the amount of information reflected in a video, the higher the difficulty for the audience to watch and understand. Once the audience's thinking limit is exceeded, the consequences will be quite serious.

Even in the past twenty years, looking at the world movie box office rankings, it is not difficult to find that the top 100 are basically very simple movies.

The effectiveness of special effects production is related to the success or failure of the entire film. In order to avoid the trouble caused by work dispersion to coordination and integration, Duke needs to integrate the entire process of post-production special effects production. For this reason, he specially found someone to design a complete special effects management information system. This is the first time in film history that such a huge computer information management system was used in filming.

Through this "digital diary" and "special effect process" system, staff in the entire post-production team who are engaged in digital processing, computer-assisted design, and three-dimensional model design can obtain the desired scene design, high-resolution model and all the lens data in each shooting process, greatly improving work efficiency.

More importantly, this system can continue to work and be used in later post-production such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

In addition, Duke is also preparing to call the crew members to make a reshoot of a scene, a scene that is cooler than bullet time.

If we talk about the most impressive scene in "The Matrix", it must be that Trinity kicked the police over, Neo avoided the agent's bullet shooting on the roof, Neo and Smith flew up two guns in the subway to confront each other, Duke wanted to add the "time solidification" during the explosion on this basis.

The final effect of the video is not the coolest, only the coolest!

To put it bluntly, these 'time solidification' achieved using technical means are all "slow" to reflect the impact of "fast" visual effects.

This method of expressing fast by "slow" is now a true master, not a Hollywood director, but the famous John Wu. Although Wu Baige is not the original creator, he is a master of the current success in this field. His slow-motion shooting scenes have had a profound impact on the production of Hollywood movie gunfights, and even changed the way Hollywood movie gunfights to a certain extent.

What Hollywood most admired in the past was the Michael Mann-style classical realistic gun battle in "The Story of Fire". Even if it is the same style of gun battle, it can be found that Hollywood is different from Wu Baige. The gun battles in Lambo and Schwarzenee are completely opposite to Wu Baige's romanticism.

It is no exaggeration to say that the impact of Wu Baige and Yuan Heping on Hollywood movies is far greater than those that can be seen on the surface, but unfortunately, they have never been able to integrate into this circle like Ang Lee.

Hollywood can be said to be an extremely xenophobic and very attractive circle.

Any enterprising Hollywood director actually understands one thing: keeping steady means failure, and the two super-large Hollywood directors are typical of this.

James Cameron is the representative of technical directors. He has been at the forefront of film technology in the whole world. It is not an exaggeration to describe him as a pioneer.

Steven Spielberg is a typical example of a businessman director. In fact, anyone with a discerning eye can see that Spielberg has basically stopped in place in recent years. The works he directed can only be described in general. It is also a recognized fact that his directorial career is declining.

Duke is not James Cameron, nor Spielberg, but he is always clear-headed and knows that learning has no end. Just like learning from Yuan Heping's strengths in filming, he will not let go of those film concepts, knowledge and techniques that are helpful to him. He can learn from Wu Baige's coolness, and his production can also refer to Japanese animation. (To be continued, please search for Astronomy, novels are better, updated and faster!
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