If you've seen The Matrix films you'll know the effect: the action freezes and the camera tracks around the subject, usually with Keanu Reeves, skirts akimbo and eerily aloft, while dishing it out to the evil forces.

Or it may be a bullet, stopped dead, camera moving around it. If only levitation and suspension of the element of time were so easy!

When viewed on the big screen, the effect is rivetting. And these days when big budget films appear to be absolutely chockers with computer-generated imagery, it's refreshing to find this frozen-moment effect was perfected some 20 years ago by English visual artist Tim MacMillan and essentially uses well-proven photographic processes.

However, the principle of capturing an event in rapid, successive frames goes farther back to the days of Eadweard Muybridge, who shot his famous horse walking/trotting/cantering/galloping sequence (and many others) with an array of still cameras.