4. The Matrix (1999)
The Wachowski siblings blew audiences' collective minds in 1999 when the released the science fiction mega-hit The Matrix. The story, about an alternate reality created by a computer simulation that allowed its inhabits to bend the rules of physics, required a way for the siblings to convey how their heroes could slow down time and control the environment around them. The Wachowski's developed a new form of photography, dubbed 'Bullet Time', to accomplish this feat. Working off techniques used by Michel Gondry in his music videos, the siblings expanded on an old photography technique, slice photography, to create Bullet Time. Bullet Time differs from slice photography, which used an array of still cameras to photograph a static object simultaneously, because it uses motion cameras to capture the image; instead of firing each camera at once like slice photography, the cameras take exposures fractions of seconds after each other thus creating the illusion of extremely slow motion captured by a virtual camera. The virtual camera can move around its subject in ways that a conventional camera couldn't thus allowing for The Matrix's physics defying action. The Bullet Time effects in The Matrix influenced many action films that followed in the Matrix's wake and showed the spectacular results a virtual camera can produce.