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 invention. In 1996, Dayton published "Virtual Camera Movement: The Way of the Future?" in American Cinematographer Magazine.
In 1997, Dayton shot a TV commercial (link) entirely in what would later be known as 'bullet time'; published the technical process in American Cinematographer; and was contacted by The Matrix VFX team, who were actively researching the effect for their upcoming film.
While The Matrix production team built their own rig and ultimately utilized the technique without formally acknowledging Dayton or his patented system, Digital Air still became an instant beneficiary of the film's global exposure. With the company established and Dayton's invention patented, published, and commercially proven by the end of 1997, the historical record was already set. Dayton's invention had been featured in
American Cinematographer,
Scientific American,
Millimeter,
Time Magazine, and
Advertising Age, as well as on
ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Furthermore, Dayton's original 1994 prototype was already in the permanent photographic history collection of the
Smithsonian Museum of American History before The Matrix was even released. Consequently, anyone looking to produce visual effects using camera arrays could easily find Digital Air's sample work, patents, and publications on the internet, and could hire Dayton to work with them
anywhere in the world.
In 2005, the company that owned 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 acquired the rig and used it in the production of Tony Scott's Déjà Vu and TV commercials for Uniqlo, BMW, Toyota, Ferrari, and others.
In 2020, to honor the visual effects team behind The Matrix—John Gaeta, Kim Libreri, George Borshukov, Dan Piponi, and Rodney Iwashina—Dayton restored the original rig and added Digital Air's Cametric™ interactive digital system to it. The resulting interactive installation, developed specifically so the activation could be remotely controlled and monitored by Digital Air in Switzerland, was intended for a temporary exhibit at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, which was ultimately cancelled due to delays in the museum's opening.
The Matrix Bullet Time Rig is now available for exhibition or purchase by or on behalf of a qualified museum anywhere in the world, with or without Digital Air's complementary digital interactive system.
Travis Scott, FEIN ©2024 Cactus Jack Records
96 x 4K Digital Air Technologies Cametric™ Camera Controllers, Los Angeles, CA
Watch it on YouTube
