In the two weeks after the Super Bowl, "The Matrix" successively released posters of the main characters, the posters were completely formulated according to Duke's ideas, in addition to having to be "cool to the scum", there were also some cyberpunk culture displays, and in March, Warner Bros. cooperated with Silicon Valley and related forum websites to hold a cyberpunk culture exhibition in San Diego, and the first official trailer of "The Matrix" was released at the exhibition.

What is the other thing about The Matrix besides being cool? It's certainly not philosophical thinking and mysticism, but a summary of the development of cyberpunk culture to the present, and it's easy to imagine how a splash such a trailer highlighting cool and cyberpunk can cause in this group.

Strictly speaking, Duke had cooler and more fun ideas in his head than "The Matrix", and even many things in the original film could be changed to a dazzling futuristic setting, but whether it was in filming or post-production, Duke only made some changes, rather than completely overturning and reinventing the wheel.

Any film has its own style, Duke knows this very well, even the most successful hodgepodge "The Avengers" is actually quite distinctive, "The Matrix" cool and cyberpunk is the most distinctive mark, on top of which it will be helpful to add some futuristic elements appropriately, but if you add too much and affect the overall style of the film, it will be a disaster.

A ↖ pure hodgepodge of films may not be a complete failure, but it will never be a huge success, such as Joss, who is good at bringing together various elements into a unified style? Wheddon, the failure of the typical hodgepodge film "Firefly" is also a testament to this.

Making a popular sci-fi film into a fan-oriented film is actually a failure, and the director seems to have a tendency to move closer to this direction in subsequent sequels after the huge success of "The Avengers". The direct sequel is far less than expected.

Cyberpunk has its own black quality, and Duke certainly wouldn't spoil it by adding something inexplicable, especially beautiful landscapes.

If a film has no style, or if the style is not distinctive, the probability of failure is higher than the probability of success.

Don't forget. It's only 1998, and it's not the era when you can bomb indiscriminately with visual effects.

The week-long Cyberpunk Cultural Exhibition attracted the attention of a large number of young fans across the United States, and Warner-owned media and NBC TV also focused on the exhibition, among which "The Matrix" was the most mentioned.

Even, this exhibition also attracted some bigwigs in the computer industry, Steve? Jobs and Bill? Gates has appeared one after another, and at a certain time, it has further accentuated the status of this cyberpunk cultural exhibition in the minds of computer and computer network enthusiasts.

Subsequently. The poster of "The Matrix" spread rapidly throughout North America at the fastest speed, with the theater chain as the fulcrum, and the first trailer quickly landed on all media platforms that can play videos, telling all viewers who saw it that the new film of the king of the summer file is about to hit strongly.

After the cooperation with Warner deepened, the biggest benefit was that Duke was not able to put forward some suitable suggestions. There is no need to spend any effort in terms of publicity, distribution and theatrical releases, and apart from a series of actions in North America. Warner Bros. has also worked with major sponsors to promote the film in major overseas box office markets.

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

The big ship that is rampaging around the world can be said to have ushered in a new era of film special effects, and Duke has reduced the cost of actors, as well as won the largest amount of tax incentives from Australia, in order to invest more money in special effects. Although "The Matrix" may not be able to reach the limit of the current special effects system, it must create a cool visual effect.

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

Special effects are arguably another major reason for the success of The Matrix, as for the philosophical reflections that have been praised by professionals. On the contrary, it has to be in a very backward position, and the failure of the last two parts of the film, especially the last one, actually shows what kind of evil consequences will be brought if some condiments of commercial films are turned into a meal.

The film's two sequels reinforce the film's unique personality on the basis of the original, especially the puzzling dialogue and philosophical speculation, which makes the storyline far beyond the limits of what mainstream audiences can bear.

As Duke said, this is a sci-fi commercial film that goes straight to the summer file, and a little touch on some things is enough, if you really want to explore it in depth like a literary film, such a huge investment scale is absolutely unaffordable.

In the past few months of post-production, Duke still uses the usual sharp editing style, and after several years of cooperation, Mike? Dawson worked with him tacitly, and these tasks were relatively easy, and the most troublesome and time-consuming were the visual effects of Industrial Light & Magic.

Under Duke's construction, ILM's special effects component is divided into three parts, one part is dedicated to ordinary special effects, one part is made to synthesize bullet time about Neo and Smith, and the last part is to use computer technology to modify several scenes of gun fighting.

Gun fighting, want to be cool and impactful, but not just Charlize? Theron can do it with his sexy figure and cool face, and 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 things such as mechs, squid armies, and Zion, which will not appear in the film, and "The Matrix" is only two hours long, and it can only be a hodgepodge of stuff stuffed with too many things.

The film is not going to be able to succeed by stuffing some of the future into it.

Most typically, the greater the amount of information reflected in a film, the more difficult it will be for the audience to watch and understand, and once the audience's thinking limit is exceeded, the consequences will be quite severe.

Even in the past 20 years, looking at the world movie box office rankings, it is not difficult to find that the top 100 movies are basically very simple movies.

In order to avoid the trouble caused by the dispersion of work to coordination and integration, Duke needed to integrate the entire process of post-production special effects, for which he specially found someone to design a complete special effects management information system, which was the first time in film history to use such a huge computer information management system in film shooting.

With this "digital diary" and "special effects process" system, the staff engaged in digital processing, computer-aided design, and 3D model design in the entire post-production team can get the desired scene design, high-resolution model, and all the lens data in each shooting process, which greatly improves work efficiency.

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

In addition, Duke is also ready to gather the crew members to make up a scene, a scene that is cooler than bullet time.

If you want to say that the most impressive scenes in "The Matrix" are definitely Trinity's flying legs kicking over the police, Neo dodging the bullets of agents on the roof of the building, and Neo and Smith flying up two guns in the subway to confront each other, and a series of 'time freeze' scenes, Duke wants to add 'time freeze' during the explosion on this basis.

The final effect of the film is not the coolest, only cooler!

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

This method of using "slow" to reflect fast, and today's real masters are also not Hollywood directors, but the famous John? Although Wu Baige is not the original, he is a practitioner of the current masterpiece in this area, and his slow-motion shooting scenes have had a profound impact on the gunfight system of Hollywood movies, and even changed the way of gunplay in Hollywood movies.

In the past, Hollywood was most admired, for example, Michael in "The Wire"? Mann-style classicism realistic gunfights, and even if it is the same unbeatable gunplay style, you can find that Hollywood is different from Wu Baige, Rambo and Schwarzen style gunfights, which are diametrically opposed to Wu Baige's romanticism.

It is no exaggeration to say that Wu Baige and Yuan Heping have had a far greater impact on Hollywood movies than 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, standing still is tantamount to failure, and Hollywood's two superpowers are typical of this.

James? Cameron is a representative of the technical stream of directors, he has always been at the forefront of the world's cinema technology, and it is not an exaggeration to describe him as a pioneer.

Steven? Spielberg is a typical businessman director, in fact, anyone with a discerning eye can see that Spielberg has basically stopped in place in recent years, and the works he directed can only be described as general, and it is also a recognized fact that his directorial career is going downhill.

Duke is not James? Cameron, nor Spielberg, but he is always sober-minded and knows that learning never ends, just like absorbing 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 in gunfights, and he can also learn from Japanese animation. (To be continued......)

ps: Ask for tickets~~