Wachowski’s The Matrix(1999; cinematographer: Bill
Pope) used still cameras to photograph actors in
flight from all angles and then digitized them into
moving images to replicate what might have been a
shot from a moving camera if any moving camera
were capable of such complex work. The sequels—
The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions
(both 2003), also directed by the Wachowskis and
photographed by Bill Pope—continued to introduce
new CGI techniques. In this new world, movies are
more likely to be set in wholly imaginary places
such as those depicted in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the
Ringstrilogy (2001–3; cinematographer: Andrew
Lesnie). So it was refreshing to see CGI used to re-
create ancient Rome in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator
(2000; cinematographer: John Mathieson).
Much of the research and development that
makes so many of these movies possible comes
from George Lucas’s special-effects company
Industrial Light & Magic, where the visual-effects
supervisor, Stefen Fangmeier, was behind the tech-
nology that made possible some of the movies men-
tioned here—including Terminator 2: Judgment
Day(1991) and Casper(1995)—as well as the impres-
sive historical re-creation of the world of the
eighteenth-century British navy in Peter Weir’s
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
(2003; cinematographer: Russell Boyd). With the
increasing complexity of CGI and the investment in
human and technical resources required for its
production, independent companies—whose artists
and technicians usually work in consultation with
the director, production designer, and director of
photography—have become increasingly responsi-
ble for creating these effects. This artistry, now vir-
tually a separate industry within the film industry,
is expensive, but it has achieved astonishingly real-
istic effects at costs acceptable to producers. In
addition to Industrial Light & Magic, other princi-
pal CGI firms are Pixar Animation Studios (now a
part of Walt Disney), Blue Sky Studios (Fox), and
Pacific Data Images (Dream Works SKG).
Motion capture (also known as motion tracking
or mocap) is a specific CGI effect in which a live-282 CHAPTER 6 CINEMATOGRAPHY
A wholly convincing cyber-characterThe character
of Davy Jones (Bill Nighy, center) flanked by his equally
frightening shipmates, made its debut in Gore Verbinski’s
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest(2006; visual
effects: John Knoll, Hal Hickel, Charles Gibson, and Allen
Hall). A creation of the most advanced special effects——
including 3-D computer-generated imagery and motion
capture technology——he is a wholly convincing cyber-
character, both human and inhuman. Jones, a physically
and morally hideous creature, uses his many supernatural
powers to inflict cruelty on virtually everyone with whom he
comes in contact. His head resembles an octopus, with long
tentacles forming a “beard”; he lacks a nose, breathing
through a tentacle on the left side of his face, and has
surprisingly blue eyes. He appears again in the third film of
the Pirates of the Caribbeanseries, Verbinski’s At World’s End
(2007), in which he is killed.