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John Gaeta

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John Gaeta (born c. 1968) is an academy award winning visual effects designer best known for his work on the Matrix film trilogy and Speed Racer, where he explored and advanced the effects methods known as "Bullet Time" , "Virtual Cinematography", and "Photo Anime".

Career

John C. Gaeta's career began in New York City. While acquiring a BFA degree with honors from New York University's film school, he was introduced to the industry as a staff production assistant for the Saturday Night Live film unit. Following NYU, he began camera and lighting work for a variety of media types including stop-motion animation, nature documentary, and holography.

A few years later, he was drafted into the camera department of the newly-formed Trumbull Company, founded by Douglas Trumbull. Trumbull was visual effects supervisor for such films as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as well as the director of such films as Silent Running and Brainstorm. It was at Trumbull Company that Gaeta was introduced and educated in a spectrum of innovative film formats such as 48fps VistaVision, 70mm Showscan, IMAX, OMNIMAX and stereo CGI (partnered with Kleiser-Walczak). These were all applied to special venue and simulator film projects.

Following this special venue period (1991-1994), Gaeta became interested in applying computer-generated animation as a means of visualizing content and visual effects concepts for directors as well as for custom camera-path planning. This led to experimentation with emerging forms of space analysis including photogrammetry, stereo and laser radar (a.k.a Reality Capture). Trumbull Company was renamed Mass Illusion and started feature film effects for movies. Gaeta continued there as an associate supervisor under the senior supervision of Oscar-winner Joel Hynek.

After co-supervising development for 3-D paint effect stylizations and LIDAR laser scanning for What Dreams May Come (1998 Visual Effects Oscar winner), Gaeta began his first solo effects supervision project for Larry and Andy Wachowski's film, The Matrix.

Designing and testing The Matrix bullet time effects began in early 1996. This work directly overlapped R&D for What Dreams May Come. Shortly after the release of the original Matrix in 1999, Gaeta continued his exploration of content design through CGI visualization by developing fully "virtual" scene and action layouts for use in realtime interactive composition. Scenes ran on the GS Cube, a machine consisting of 16 parallel processors each based on a PlayStation 2, but with HD rendering resolution. The research was demonstrated at Siggraph 2000. Later, in 2006, partnered with Rudy Poat, he would return to real time cinema experimentation by inserting, possibly the first ever, real time composed and rendered, full resolution/2k content into a theatrically released movie, Trapped Ashes.

In 2000, Gaeta was brought on as the senior visual effects supervisor to complete the Matrix Trilogy including The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. This pair of films features over 2000 visual effects shots. Overall VFX conceptual design as well as research and development was initiated for the final two installments in January 2000. There was a wide range of effects content from large-scale man vs. machine-type battles, to anime-styled hyper-real moments. The centerpieces of this expanded universe was the creation of "Virtual Cinematography" and "Virtual Effects," phrases coined by Gaeta in 1999 and 2000.

In fully synthetic scenes within The Matrix sequels, all aspects including principal characters, elaborate performances, dynamic events, and deep surrounding scenery were computer generated by way of customized "image based" rendering techniques. Content components were constructed from "universal capture" sources based upon real actors, production design and cinematography, in a "sample cinema" type process more analogous to producing virtual reality than to film making.

The years, 2005-2008 marked a deepening of the pursuit of sample cinema with new ground covered in the feature Speed Racer. The advent of a new genre type, dubbed "Photo Anime", was the centerpiece of a retro-modern universe in which optimistic pop art design("Poptimisitic') threaded through dramatic collage based editing and motion graphic heavy kung fu car action. Inspired in part by the production attitude of Sin City, the expressive animated cinema of Hideo Miyazaki and Andy Warhol, the Wachowski brothers focused Gaeta's sensibilities once more toward new forms of post cinematography, deploying end to end high definition pipelines,comprehensive greenscreen/virtual set processes, fully computer generated race worlds, "2 and 1/2 D" layering methodologies, "faux lensing" as applied to vr photography and "techno color" in pursuit of a different movie experience. In addition to visual effects design for the film, Gaeta was additionally enlisted to creatively produce the Wii game counterpart.

Gaeta continues to imagine through a complement of directing, visual development and exploration of emerging creative technologies. He is an avid proponent of realtime virtual cinema(also referred as Navigational or NAV Cinema) and "Hybrid Entertainment". Hybrid Entertainment are unifying future content formats found between cinema,interactive games and other alternative media.

Awards

  • 2003 Visual Effects Society Award for Outstanding Visual Effects Photography in a Motion Picture for The Matrix Reloaded (U-cap facial photography), shared with Kim Libreri, George Borshukov, Paul Ryan
  • Nominated, 2003 Visual Effects Society Award for Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects Driven Motion Picture for The Matrix Revolutions, shared with Kim Libreri, George Murphy, Craig Hayes

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=4402&page=9

Virtual cinematography

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