Melbourne based Richard Kendall and Tom Brandon are the creative and technological brains behind Splice Boys. Since the early 2010s, the pair have been expanding the capabilities and applications of multi-camera-array visualisation through enhanced hardware designs and modified software solutions. The Splice Boys took their innovative processes around the world, only to find themselves flung back to Melbourne till the clouds of COVID began to clear.
Many recognise their processes from bullet-time photography, popularised in The Matrix (1999), which won Academy and BAFTA awards for special effects. With its prescient predictions of what was to come, The Matrix is now a cultural touchstone. The effect’s name refers to the bullet-ducking scene, shot high on a tower overlooking central Sydney. In it, the lead character, Neo, demonstrates his mastery over time and space by impossibly weaving under a bullet speeding toward him in slow motion. Simultaneously, the camera’s eye sweeps and wraps around the unfolding scene in variations of standard time before dropping the viewer back into raw reality.
Multidimensional visualisation. It's a New World
Enter the Time Booth. Multiple possibilities for partnerships
It is twenty plus years since The Matrix showed how to bend time and space to explode concentrated moments. The effect is now a standard component of visual storytelling, and it continues to evolve. A multi-camera-array is not the only way to realise the imaginative effect in films and videos. Still, it is the gold standard for visualising various human experiences, responses and interactions found within the discontinuities of time and space.
In the last decade, multi-camera-array processes have been evident in movies as disparate as Zoolander 2, Justice League, and more recently in the French Dispatch. In Sherlock Holmes – movie and television versions – the effect beautifully visualised the elusive cerebral dimensions of the character.
Splice Boys used their advanced versions of the technology to help Chemist Warehouse express the female athleticism of AFLW players. Nike engaged Splice Boys to convert one of their prominent retail spaces in New York City into a multidimensional studio and to provide extended opportunities for the public to create their own branded collateral.
Like it is for film and video, more uses are becoming apparent for the technology in public and sponsored spaces and during large events. With inbuilt distribution and branding capabilities, the Splice Boys version of the technology is increasingly valuable to its partners.
In the late 2000s, Richard Kendall stepped into a then-burgeoning world of visual opportunity, armed with a freshly minted degree in scientific and documentary photography from RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology). He won early recognition as a finalist in the prestigious national Head On portrait prize. Kendall was an early creator of multimedia content for the ABC, helping retell the stories of Victoria's Black Saturday fires. Richard says, then and now, his overarching aim is “to express a commitment to visual language, innovation, and story-telling.”
Kendall soon teamed up with experienced Melbourne filmmaker and stills photographer Tom Brandon. Together they formed Splice Boys to both ride and shape the expansion of multi-camera array photography. Tom’s main long-term concern has been combining creative concepts with technical innovation to realise new visions in photography and video.
2013, and the team is working out of Shanghai, initially on an epic Chinese adventure-action film, the type we know so well. As they proceeded across China and the Middle East, corporate commissions flowed. They adapted their techniques for various external environments and expanded their creative responses in meeting different creative requests. Applying their now highly-evolved processes for international brands, they quickly found themselves in demand in New York. There, the team produced a series of high-profile, site-specific activations for major corporate clients and advertisers.
Then COVID stopped the world in its tracks. The Splice Boys had to pack their technology into boxes and retreat to Melbourne. COVID has been an inflection event for the world, and many things will never be the same. The team spent their enforced confinement expanding into even more advanced forms of visualisation (volumetric image capture and cyber scanning—more about that another time).
After a two-year enforced hiatus, the Splice Boys stand poised to expand the uses for their already highly evolved and tested processes. To do so, they are partnering with It’sOutNow, an experienced content producer and mass-event photography specialist.
Ways of visualising these recalibrated times are already here. Multidimensional moving images created through multi-camera array photography beckons a visual Renaissance that’s been coming for some time.
More information
Contact Robert McGrath
info@itsoutnow.co
+61 41352 5588