Visual Effects
Digital Air Technologies provides still and video camera arrays as a production service worldwide. We help our clients make TV ads, films, events, and installations.
We collaborate with the most creative production companies and directors in the world, providing everything from previsualization to production to on-set post production for immediate client approval of captured assets.
Perfect by Design
We design and make all of the specialized hardware and software that powers our work.
Our products and services include synchronous still and video camera array rentals, the original Matrix bullet time rig rental, networked cameras and controllers, visual effects supervision services, on set post production, and a white label social media sharing app for public facing events and installations.
Our systems are available world wide as a visual effects production service of Digital Air Technologies, Switzerland.
Our clients collaborate with us on the creation of temporary interactive photo booths based on our visual effects systems. As full stack developers we provide our own white label iOS app for participants to select and send themselves the resulting media for seamless social sharing. Installations using our technology have been fully automated since 2012.
Bullet Time
In 1994, five years before The Matrix (1999), Dayton Taylor invented and patented a system for producing time-independent virtual camera movement in motion pictures and other media. In 1995 Dayton incorporated Digital Air, Inc. in New York to commercialize his then patent pending invention. In 1996 he published "Virtual Camera Movement: The Way of the Future?" in American Cinematographer Magazine. In 1997 Dayton shot this TV commercial (link) filmed entirely in what would later be called flo-motion or bullet time, published how it was made in American Cinematographer Magazine using his then patented invention, and was contacted by the VFX team responsible for The Matrix.
The Matrix production team built a rig specifically for the needs of the film, but with Digital Air established and Dayton's invention patented, published and commercially proven by the end of 1997, Digital Air was the principal beneficiary of the global exposure brought by The Matrix on its release in 1999. Dayton's invention had already been featured in articles in American Cinematographer, Scientific American, Millimeter, Time Magazine and Advertising Age and on ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings and Dayton's original 1994 prototype was already in the permanent photographic history collection of the Smithsonian Museum of American History. Anyone looking to produce visual effects using camera arrays could find Digital Air's sample work, patents and and publications on the internet, and they could hire Dayton to work with them anywhere in the world.
In 2005 the company that owned the the original bullet time rig that was built for The Matrix was liquidated. The liquidator found Dayton's name on the first page of the development notes and asked him if he wanted to purchase it. Dayton purchased the rig and used parts of it in the production of Tony Scott's Deja Vu and TV commercials for Uniqlo, BMW, Toyota and Ferrari.
The Matrix is an artistic masterpiece and a cultural icon, in part because of its phenomenal use of Dayton's invention. In 2020, to honor the visual effects effects team behind The Matrix: John Gaeta, Kim Libreri, George Borshukov, Dan Piponi, Rodney Iwashina, and the others, Dayton restored the original rig and added an additional interactive digital system that he developed to it. The resulting interactive installation was intended for a temporary exhibit at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles that was cancelled as a result of COVID-19.
The Matrix Bullet Time Rig is now available for exhibition or purchase by or on behalf of a qualified museum.
Travis Scott, FEIN ©2024 Cactus Jack Records
96 x 4K Digital Air Technologies Cametric™ Camera Controllers, Los Angeles, CA
Watch it on YouTube
