Wing Commander Movie's Extended Timeslice Sequences Revealed (August 5, 2018)

AD

Finder of things, Doer of stuff
The Wing Commander movie featured some of the earliest instances of what would later be dubbed "bullet time" in feature films after it was popularized by 'The Matrix'. Several sequences were shot for the film's jump travel sequences, but not all of them made it into the final film. This clip includes some of that extra footage from an early edit of the movie spliced into where it would have appeared originally. The footage was likely trimmed for pacing, but it's still pretty cool!



--
Original update published on August 5, 2018
 
Wing Commander may have been an early instance in movies, but that 'time slicing' technique has been used well before it - I distinctly remember it used in an advertisement for shampoo of all things (a model would fling her beautifully washed hair and the 'camera view' would pan around it). I think what made The Matrix's 'bullet time' so popular is that it extended the technique beyond a frozen moment in time to a slow motion 360-degree view around key action scenes - that is, it wasn't static when the 'camera view' panned around like it was in the jump sequence.

That aside, nice to see the effort made beyond what we actually see in the movie. I understand the reasoning behind the difficulty and danger of this particular jump, but one would hope that not all jumps are so violent to the ship's internals! (Some of the cut views seemed to show an explosion or fire in one of the internal bays.)
 
Just a question about the in-universe lore... are jumps always that violent, or is it just because the 'Claw is jumping through a pulsar?
 
Just a question about the in-universe lore... are jumps always that violent, or is it just because the 'Claw is jumping through a pulsar?

There's an episode of Academy where the Claw jumps a pulsar with no ill effects. Blair does it a couple of times in a Broadsword too, IIRC, and in that particular case he and his wingman experience the passage of time during the jump.

Of course, a lot of the stuff in the movie is inconsistent with things we see elsewhere, so as far as the movie's continuity goes, it's possible that they are always that violent. Guessing that in the two cases where we see violent jumps in the movie, though, it's due to the jump points being close to gravitationally significant objects (Scylla and a pulsar, respectively).
 
  • Like
Reactions: AD
Wing Commander may have been an early instance in movies, but that 'time slicing' technique has been used well before it - I distinctly remember it used in an advertisement for shampoo of all things (a model would fling her beautifully washed hair and the 'camera view' would pan around it). I think what made The Matrix's 'bullet time' so popular is that it extended the technique beyond a frozen moment in time to a slow motion 360-degree view around key action scenes - that is, it wasn't static when the 'camera view' panned around like it was in the jump sequence.

What's the point of mentioning this? We know it was used and pioneered in music videos and the odd GAP commercial. That doesn't change anything about what was said in the update. The first such sequences to show up in music videos (a Rolling stones music video) was in 1996, only 2 years before they filmed the WC movies. "Well before it" is pretty relative, considering we're actually over 20 years from when the movie was filmed at this point (19 since it's release).

Nobody is denying the Matrix did it better... That's pretty much the entire point of mentioning the movie in this update at all. People were surprised by the sequence in the WC movie and thought it was neat. However we're only a couple months ahead of the Matrix coming out by the time the movie did get put in theaters (it was actually completed by the the fall of '98 but sat in limbo with Fox for months). The Matrix did so much more with similar tech. It was a case of multiple companies in a race to figure out how to use the tech in movies at the same time. People remember the Matrix and not the WC movie because the Matrix was actually a good movie that people went and actually saw in theaters.

That aside, nice to see the effort made beyond what we actually see in the movie. I understand the reasoning behind the difficulty and danger of this particular jump, but one would hope that not all jumps are so violent to the ship's internals! (Some of the cut views seemed to show an explosion or fire in one of the internal bays.)


The idea in the movie is that it's a super complicated jump. There's a lot of 'safe' jumps that Confed has mapped and transmits to ships using the Navcoms. However pulsars and quasars mess with computer systems used for calculating jumps. The space-time distortion means someone or something has to calculate the trajectory changes to enter the jumppoint on the fly (aka a Pilgrim who can feel those fluctuations and can do math really fast in his head). I assume it's those gravity fluctuations that actually make the jump "violent" since you're constantly maneuvering at the same time that you're trying to skip through a wormhole essentially.


There's an episode of Academy where the Claw jumps a pulsar with no ill effects. Blair does it a couple of times in a Broadsword too, IIRC, and in that particular case he and his wingman experience the passage of time during the jump.

Of course, a lot of the stuff in the movie is inconsistent with things we see elsewhere, so as far as the movie's continuity goes, it's possible that they are always that violent. Guessing that in the two cases where we see violent jumps in the movie, though, it's due to the jump points being close to gravitationally significant objects (Scylla and a pulsar, respectively).

That's pretty much my take on it. They make a pretty big deal about it not being a standard jump at several points in the movie. It's a shortcut but it's a rough one. Confed has just been going around instead of through for years for a reason. They even call it a "level 5 jump point interphase" before the jump to the Ulysses Corridor, suggesting that a level one is probably pretty smooth sailing.
 
Just a question about the in-universe lore... are jumps always that violent, or is it just because the 'Claw is jumping through a pulsar?

The novels describe jumps in somewhat similar terms to what we saw in the movie (a jolt, disorientation, potential nausea, etc). There's a sequence or two in End Run where Bear describes how it feels to a person.
 
  • Like
Reactions: AD
People remember the Matrix and not the WC movie because the Matrix was actually a good movie that people went and actually saw in theaters.

To be fair, I enjoyed the WC movie when I first saw it - and disliked The Matrix for its obvious cribbing on William Gibson's stuff ala Terminator and one Mister Harlan Ellison.

"Good" is subjective here, history is not.
 
To be fair, I enjoyed the WC movie when I first saw it - and disliked The Matrix for its obvious cribbing on William Gibson's stuff ala Terminator and one Mister Harlan Ellison.

"Good" is subjective here, history is not.
I like them both for different reasons. I personally feel there's a lot to love in the WC movie, but there's some serious issues in the theatrical cut that are hard to ignore. But that's also why I love clips like the one this update is about.

There's little details and thought that went into making this move that got murdered by the editing. Interestingly, in one of the early cuts, the pilot you see in this clip would immediate launch to patroll/escort the claw. After the launch the audio in that cut had... Probably Obutu, saying Spirit's wing had launched... A detail that's in the script but not in the final movie
 
The point was I didn't think that having it in the WC movie was that big a deal. But obviously you think otherwise, so I'm sorry for commenting 'unnecessarily'.
 
The point was I didn't think that having it in the WC movie was that big a deal. But obviously you think otherwise, so I'm sorry for commenting 'unnecessarily'.

The original update isn't about whether the sequence holds some special place in history or not, so it's surprising that your reaction to some of the first deleted sequences from the movie to see the light of day is "People did it in commercials first".
 
The original update isn't about whether the sequence holds some special place in history or not, so it's surprising that your reaction to some of the first deleted sequences from the movie to see the light of day is "People did it in commercials first".
Well, I must say, I'm as confused as Wedge by your reaction to this. Wedge's comment was a "by the way" kind of thing, which didn't necessarily add much to the discussion, but it also didn't detract anything from the discussion. On the other hand, I found your "what's the point of mentioning this" to be aggressive in a very odd way - odd in the sense that I don't get what on earth would induce you to even say such a thing. Why would it bother you at all that people go off on a tangent? Seems like a pretty harsh way to come down on someone just because you didn't think his comment is relevant.
 
Still, the camera system used for that shot was brandnew right? Doubt the shampoo commercial used that setup...
 
Back
Top