Breaking Down 300

On Wednesday, May 16, I went to a presentation by Lindsay Adams put on by the Vancouver Siggraph Chapter. Lindsay is the Senior Compositor at Animal Logic. He gave an excellent presentation on the compositing work they did for 300.



Interesting takeaways:

• There were very few real sets used. Occasionally, there would be a bit of rock wall (that eventually was heavily enhanced with CG/matte work). The rest was all digital/comp work.
  
  
• A concept artist on set did quick comps to get initial production approval, which were then used by the team as a guide for their work.
  
  
• They did a first-pass comp of all their assigned shots in about 5 weeks. It let them get production approval much quicker and reduced wasted effort.
  
  
• The skies were all matte paintings / photos that were warped, morphed, and transformed to give the appearance of motion.
  
  
• The skies had a neat coffee-stain plate overlaid onto them that production really liked – they felt it gave the film more of a graphic novel feel.
  
  
• They filmed live plates for a number of elements because they just looked way better than CG: smoke, dust, some water.
  
  
• The process to achieve the desaturated/palettized look of the film was called "The Crush" – Animal Logic (and the other vendors) delivered shots that were "Half Crush", and a final production studio took it the rest of the way. This was to achieve a consistent look for the whole movie.
  
  
• The on-set lighting was very diffuse and flat. All of the shots were "re-lit" in compositing using comp tricks.
  
  
• For shots with variable timing, they’d always work over-length and on the slowest timing, and adjust to the final timing variations as the last step. This gave them the most flexibility to changing production demands.
  
  
• To multiply the Persian army in the close-up shots, they took the plate, isolated various actors, and duplicated them using flopping, re-timing, etc. Because they were mostly hidden by the "hero" close-ups, it worked.
  
  
• Lots and lots of hand roto work to get the CG spears and swords matched up to the actors’ props.
  
  
• Their most complicated shot was the "Crazy Horse" – in the final film, this shot was the first one which had Leonidas breaking away from the main Spartan group, attacking multiple enemies and launching a spear. They shot this on stage with 3 cameras mounted on the same head, shooting fast (i.e., slo-mo) at different zooms and focal lengths. In comp, they managed to blend all of these together into a single shot, using warping to merge the different camera shots together, and retiming to get the slo/fast/slo effect. Plus all the usual crazy layering.
  

A very detailed look at what goes on behind-the-scenes. It was also neat to see the full extent of what can be accomplished using compositing.