300 (2006) | Making of CGI Featurette

Almost all of the film is shot against a green screen, so it's up to the visual effects department and the visual effects art department to create all the backgrounds from scratch using images in the style of the comic book. I'm a visual effects designer, or sometimes referred to as a visual effects art director. That means when they talk about something being in the background, I've got to visualize what that particular thing in the background is going to look like. The only exterior shot in the movie, well, the only handful, there's the three right here. This horror sequence we did shoot outside, but that wasn't the sky of the day. I will take the dailies footage, and I can literally grab those still frames, load them up in Photoshop, pull a key off of the blue screen, and start illustrating what the final visual effects shot is going to look like based off of the footage we shot the day before. I think at that point it became more exciting because you start to really see, even in sort of skeletal stages, what's coming and what's happening, and I think you get even more into it then, and you get momentum, and when you start seeing those things come alive, it's really exciting, you know. Usually in a movie, you're trying to figure out what the look is going to be, or you're trying to get into the vision of the director or the project. Frank Miller, you know, in his book, it was so clear what the look was, and Zach was going off of that, so it was kind of like that work was done for me in a way that was easy, but how do you interpret, you know, a book into 3 dimensions, or how do you make print come alive in film? The lighting in this movie is really basically, it's trying to do 2 things. It's trying to simulate the look of the comic book and give us a nice, even base of lighting from which we can do the crush. One of the things that I think is really overlooked, but I think really evident in 300 is that when you blow out a highlight, if you did that in a real photograph, the sky would be white, and that's not what happens in 300. The highlights are blown out, but the sky still has detail. And in some ways, even though it sounds super simple, it's incredibly sort of different from the way you see. One of the devices that we use to create that high-contrast look is called crushing, where we take all the digital information in the film at the low end, which is towards the blacks, and all the digital information at the high end, which is towards the whites, and we compress it so that there's a lot less information, but there are a lot more black portions of the image and a lot more white portions. What eventually winds up happening is the contrast lines where the blacks feather into the mid-range are very smooth and very much like Frank's drawings. It also takes the colors in the mid-range and makes them blossom so that it has a very painterly effect. It looks a little bit like some watercolor washes that Frank uses. It affects, of course, the way we do, then, everything else. To do a film based on a graphic novel, we need to colorize things in a particular graphic way, otherwise it basically becomes a contemporary historical epic, which wasn't Zach's intention, you know, and he said that straight up. We, when we made 300, we had to adhere to a strict set of rules for the production of the movie when we said we're going to make it look like a graphic novel. I looked at that and thought, well, why can't we actually have that kind of stylization during the movie? Why do our skies have to be, you know, photographic skies? Maybe we can make them a little bit painterly. Maybe we can actually push the film in this kind of weird world between live-action and almost animated film. Every piece of it needs to be manufactured and revisualized because you don't have, you can't film anything that's real. If Zach is, you know, composing shots to mimic Frank Miller's particular boarding style and so on, I'm trying to colorize the shots to mimic Lynn's color styling. Looking at what she had done for the graphic novel, I thought it'd be interesting to actually kind of try and mimic that. One of the things I've been doing is using coffee stain skies, which is, you know, literally me getting, you know, balsamic vinegar or watercolor or whatever, coffee stains, and getting a nice texture on a piece of paper and then scanning that texture in and then actually mixing those watercolor textures into a photographic sky. What's going to end up being the look of the movie is that there's no difference between what's real and what's virtual. It allows you to have these actors and to have them play very believable characters in a very fantastic world, and it's just another tool to then take that performance and really insert it into the world of Zach Snyder and how he perceives, you know, this great thing Frank Miller created. From the beginning, I was like, look, one's actually to be way taller, like crazy scale. That was part of the aesthetic, you know, of the storyteller, sort of linking in with the impossible image that you see, because everyone's around the campfire in there a little bit. And, okay, he's king of the Persian army, so what? Yeah, but he's all in gold and he's bald and he's 9 feet tall. Now, okay, all right, good, what else? You know, it's like, now this story sounds a little more interesting. There's a shocking scene where Leonidas shoves the messengers into the well. It was a great way to reveal Spartans were different than the other Greeks. They were the oldest of the ancient Greeks. They lived by much more barbaric rules, and so I wanted to show that they broke rules constantly, which they did. It was blasphemy to kill a messenger, and to kill 30 of them was beyond blasphemy. But those were the Spartans. I think of any movie I've done, this has the highest number of difficult shots. In terms of the visual effects elements that we shot, we shot 8,631 visual effects elements. It's my record. Let me guess. It must be Xerxes. The trick of this scene really is a huge height differential. Xerxes is supposed to be 7 1⁄2 feet tall. He's played by Rodrigo Santoro. But in actuality, Rodrigo and Jerry Butler are exactly the same height. So we had to figure out a way to make these two characters drastically different size, but keep the quality of their interaction natural and convincing and draw the viewer out of the movie. Frank's book shows that Xerxes is almost a head and a half taller than Leonidas. So we did a test for that. And so the 10-foot version of Xerxes was outrageous. He just looked like a giant. He just looks huge. So we made him 8 feet tall, and that still looked a little big. So we went to 7 feet. He looked a little small at 7 feet. So we settled on 7 1⁄2. We totally had to come down to 7 1⁄2 feet from 10 feet because of the ridiculousness of 10 feet. 7 1⁄2 feet tall for two characters that are exactly the same size, it just shows how over the top Xerxes is. Everything about him is over the top. So the scale is awesome. Some of the work we did just in camera. Since a camera only has one eye, it's limited in its ability to tell the difference between a big object far away and a small object close up. Leonidas was shot with one camera, and Xerxes was shot with another camera. The camera that shot Xerxes was using the same perspective that it would have if it had been shot anomaly, it was just a little bit closer. When they were acting, Rodrigo had this teeny little chariot. He had his hands on a little chariot. Jerry Butler, on the other hand, had to look over the top of Rodrigo's head because he was looking at something that was supposed to be taller than Rodrigo really was. We would put a laser, sometimes on the green screen, way back. And so those were the two tricks we had to use to scale. With the wall of the deck, if you look at Frank's drawing, it's almost like the body's pressing a blade, washing down on him. And that was really, I think, the big thing. The challenge was to start the wall off as a big, vertical, intimidating element. We started off doing a little bit of pre-vis just to kind of get an idea of what Zach wanted to see in the movie. Chris and I talked about it a lot, about what the aesthetic of the fall would be. And we decided we really need to see him get hit by a body, to see him fall down. We couldn't reset and do it a bunch of times because it took a long time to carry the bodies and put them up and then dump them down. So Chris came up with this idea of shooting the same drop with three cameras to allow us to get all three plates at once. And also to have continuity between the fall because it actually gave us the foreground, the mid-ground, and the background all in one take. That's what that was for. Okay, stay with me as I have some cool behind-the-scenes trivia. Stop Motion has featured prominently in famous science fiction films. Two of the Robocop movies feature the stop motion technique at work. And the finale of the first Terminator film was done with stop motion. Now, do you like my shirt? You can get one for yourself in the shop under this video. And remember to click here below to subscribe for more great content.