Kaydara

May 27, 2011 1:35 AM

Kaydara is a French-made Matrix fan film, released on the 21st of May 2011, which has been noted for the high quality of its special effects. The entire 55-minute film is now available to stream for free from its site.

The film follows a bounty hunter who does not believe in the prophecy of "The One." Apparently, it was made by two reclusive Frenchmen in the mountains of France.

posted by chmmr (10 comments total)

I kind of wish the Wachowski brothers had moved to the mountains of France in 2003.
posted by Optamystic at 1:58 AM on May 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

claymatrix
posted by idiopath at 3:44 AM on May 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

idiopath: The first couple of minutes certainly seem that way, yes.
posted by chmmr at 3:52 AM on May 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

Whoa.
posted by Fizz at 4:39 AM on May 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

I don't know what the relationship might be, but Kaydara software is a francophone enterprise that had an office in Montreal, and provided some of the most sophisticated MOCAP tools out there. Their tools, I believe, were used in the making of the Matrix films.

So this might not be a wannabe fan project, but rather an exercise by the masterful originators of some of these special effects.
posted by StickyCarpet at 4:47 AM on May 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

bahahaah excellent and funny! the bazillion dollars hollywood moviemakers are crying for the lost opportunitah!
posted by elpapacito at 7:45 AM on May 27, 2011

Ahhhh! The Matrix Runs on Windows is pretty good. (Link found on second link in FPP.)

Love the ending line!
posted by Xoebe at 8:51 AM on May 27, 2011

Really impressive stuff indeed...

At first I thought it was shot in French and then dubbed into English, as some of the dialogue and acting was pretty poor (the little brother, for starters) but I can't immediately see anything to support that theory in the production notes - I've not had a chance to watch the Making Of's yet. I guess that while the foley was great, if they weren't working with professional actors, the looping might have been flawed.

Some of the fight sequences were excellent, and I really enjoyed the idea of Kaydara and Neo fighting each other and the agents at the same time...

It's so exciting to see this kind of stuff coming out. In a similar way to the way the music industry is developing, once decent digital distribution channels come together which have a method of rewarding the creators financially (a la Bandcamp, et al for music), Hollywood really ought to be shaking in its boots...
posted by benzo8 at 3:26 PM on May 27, 2011

benzo8: IIRC they list voiceover artists for each of the characters in the credits.
posted by idiopath at 3:38 PM on May 27, 2011

wow... how weird....

I used to work at Kaydara in Mtl. We provided the software to control the camera for the bullet time sequence in Matrix 1 and mocap/camera tracking software for the sequels.

Kaydara is supposed to be an african god of time. They chose that name since initally the goal of the company was to go into real time control software for different devices in the entertainment industry. This being Mtl there were a lot of ex Softimage/Discreet people and they ended specializing in mocap and retargeting of animation data.

None of the people mentionned on the site ring a bell though so it's probably just a fluke.
posted by coust at 6:17 PM on May 27, 2011