Time slice is achieved through using a set of stills or video cameras placed around a subject. The cameras are trigged either simultaneously or sequentially. The singular frames are taken from each camera and are then displayed consecutively through means of animation, thus creating an orbiting view point around the subject. Due to the nature of the time slice, the camera often becomes the subject or character and the space becomes an object of constant flux. This technique has proven to be extremely popular within the gaming genre and virtual film and has been utilised in numerous different manners in films, advertisements and other media genres.


An array of different viewpoints and paths can be created via virtual cinematography, but stills or motion cameras usually have to conform to an assigned path. Post production techniques, some of which can be seen in many time slice scenarios in Matrix, involve a combination of time slice, digital animation and montage to achieve the multiple viewpoint effect. The altercation of pace becomes a vehicle for the director to create an abstraction of space and vision; altering time as well as conjuring the notion of fantasy within the viewer. Films such as Matrix through use of both real footage and virtual simulation, reached a new realm in the genre in that RAW data matter was used to generate new images “no-matter”, thus according to Sharpe (1993:1), can no longer be defined as one or other in that they are both leaked into each other and exist in a state of “in betweens”.



Time slice, as well as stop motion, although composed of static images, evolves itself into a mutative process where one images bleeds into another, the animation holds a sense of what was and what is to happen; the images therefore exist in a zone of continuous flux, juxtaposing images which are stationary and ones which are exposed to new zones of influence.