'300' changed all that- I am now perfectly happy with reality but I am pretty enamored of complete fabrication! For those who don't know, '300' is the cinematic retelling of Frank Miller's comic about the Battle of Thermopylae, in which 300 Spartan soldiers held Xerxes' masses at bay for three days before being annihilated by their Persian enemy. This all happened in August of 480 BC on the Mediterranean coast. '300' was shot almost entirely on bluescreen, in Montreal, in the dead of winter, so at this point I'm pretty fearless. And I've learned to speak French.
PRESS
There's
a page up
at Provue
about how we used Panorama to make
'300'
SolaceInCinema has a really cool comparison to between screen shots
of the trailer and some panels in Frank Millers graphic novel. We
did design the shots to look like the comic, but it's really
entertaining to see so many examples in one place. Check it out
here.
There is a flattering prerelease
review here.
On March 8, 2007, Zack Snyder, Larry Fong and I hosted
a discussion about 300 at the Apple Store in Santa Monica. As a
total Mac zealot this was pretty exciting for me. 350 people came,
which is apparently a record!
There is a nice article
in the New York Times. Too
bad the guy who did the final review hates the movie so
much.
Here's a review that I found after our
preview screening on November 16th.
TRIVIA
As of February 24, 2008, 300 had made 457 MILLION DOLLARS
worldwide. Wow.
There are about 1500 cuts in the film.
There are 1306 visual effects shots in the film.
The work was photographed completely in Montreal, in an old
locomotive repair station. (which has since been demolished)
New
Deal Studios in Los Angeles shot some insert
footage.
Ten visual effects vendors contributed to the film, spread over
three continents.
The vendors are (in no particular order)
Hybride
Buzz
Images
Pixel
Magic
Screaming
Death Monkey
At The
Post
Technicolor Creative
Services
Scanline
Amalgamated
Pixels
Hydraulx
Meteor
Studios
Animal
Logic
I've learned a bit about Quebec visual effects vendors on 300, if
you're planning on doing any visual effects work in Montreal, I
have plenty of interesting things to tell you. There are some real
gems in Montreal, and then...
The digital internediate was done at Company 3 in Santa
Monica.
We used bluescreen 90% of the time, and greenscreen for 10%.
We chose blue because it better matched out lighting paradigm
(green would have been too bright) and because red garments (like
spartan capes) key better when shot over blue.
There was one day of location shooting, which was for the horses
that were shot for the 'approaching sparta' scene.
Post production took almost a year.
The film was edited on an Avid, with an HD cut also
maintained in Final Cut Pro.
The 3D was made using Maya, XSI, and
Lightwave.
The 2D composites were made with Shake,
Inferno, Digital Fusion, and Combustion.
We prefer OS
X, but some portions of the movie were made under
Linux and a tiny bit was made under
Windows.
Asset management was handled by custom software written in the
Panorama development environment, made
by Provue.
Color management was handled by Truelight software.
The film was scanned on a northlight scanner and was recorded on the
arrilaser.
We did our
2K viewing and film recording, and preliminary DI testing at Warner
Bros Motion Picture Imaging. We used a Baselight.
Most of the film was shot at high speed, between 50 and 150fps.
Normal film is at 24fps. This was a key reason why we shot the
movie on film.
The film was transferred to HD SR tape and quicktime, and HD
quicktimes were the basis for the HD preview cuts.
The working resolution for the film was 2K (2048x1556), at a
working aspect ratio of 2.11 and a projected aspect ratio of
2.35.
There is an IMAX version of 300 at compatible locations that
support R-rated movies.
MEDIA
We have a trailer on youtube. It's a great trailer, and the were
just a couple of temps left to finish when this trailer was
completed. Of course, art is never completed, only abandoned, but
I'm pretty happy wth this one.
There's a high definition trailer available at Apple, click
here.
