Bullet time was a common concept in cartoons for a long time before the advent of technology that could apply this effect to real-life filming. One of the earliest examples is the effect of the closing credits of the late 1960s Japanese animated series Mach Go Go Go: when the protagonist Speed ??jumps off the Mach 5 race car, he freezes in mid-air, and then the camera moves from the front to An arc-shaped perspective change effect is made on the side.

The first music video to use bullet time was Bj?rk's "Army of Me", directed by Michel Gondry in 1996. In Dario Argento's 1996 horror film The Stendhal Syndrome, CGI and a bullet were used to create the effect of bullet time. In the 1998 BBC documentary series Intimate Universe: The Human Body, Tim Macmillan used time division to create the effect of bullet time. In 1994, Dayton Taylor invented a film-based system called TimeTrack, which is used on many television programs. This effect was also used in the 1998 movie "Blade" and its subsequent sequel "Blade II".

Bullet time became widely known with the movie "The Matrix" (1999). John Gaeta and his team expanded on this effect, using digital techniques including modifying the sequence of frames and manipulating the images with CGI. The film features BUF's cutting-edge perspective-changing technology, Michel Gondry's music videos, and other products, such as The GAP, from beginning to end. In 2003, bullet time was further developed in The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. High-resolution computer-generated techniques such as virtual cinematography and holographic capture were used in the film. The virtual environments in The Matrix trilogy are based on cutting-edge computer graphics rendering technology first used in Paul Debevec's 1997 film The Campanile Movie and refined by Debevec's early collaborator George Borshukov.

Bullet Time "Bullet Time" is a registered trademark of Warner Bros., the publisher of The Matrix. Previously, it was a registered trademark in the 3D field of the developer of A Better Tomorrow (game) (Max Payne).