The Matrix
Matrix 2: Matrix Reloaded
Matrix 3: Matrix Revolutions
From my outspoken evangelism of User Interface Design through the 1990's I was contacted to bring real world user interfaces to film (for Mission Impossible 2). Audiences could quickly see through the computer fakery of a QuickTime Movie Player being used as a CCT feed as shown in Jurassic park. My charter was to make the interfaces seen in film appear sophisticated yet still real and credible. After providing real world interfaces for a few films and TV series, I was contacted and enlisted in the army of people to work on the Matrix films.
Over a year of work on the two sequels, the animated feature film and the website resulted in the creation of around a hundred interactive interfaces. These were all wired up as touch screens into all the craft, so that they could literally be used by the actors to get better performances, or puppeteered in the background by technicians off-screen. Some of the ships screens were also wired into joysticks so that when a craft moved on a soundstage gimbal, all of the screens could change and match how the craft was actually moving. Power station screens were based on real world power station and controls. Craft navigation screens all showed complex flight data consistent with real world forces and flight physics. Hacking into mainframes used actual real world Unix commands. All this was to create a believability in that what the screens were communicating, by designing the interfaces as though they were real.
All work and screen shots
© Warner Brothers 2002