Behind the Scenes of 300....

Movies 2.0: Digital Effects Magic Explained

In today's digital Hollywood, cameras capture scenes in bits, not frames—and computer wizards conjure up everything from impossible beasts to cliff-top battlegrounds. Film is dead. Long live the movies.

Chris Watts has never worked with a wolf before. He and his crew are the designated animal wranglers for a scene in the upcoming movie 300, directed by Zack Snyder. The wolf in question is making an appearance in the epic about Spartan warriors at the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. Watts and company are trying not only to make the creature stalk through the scene convincingly, but also to capture a particularly menacing shine on its teeth. "If you dipped a popsicle stick in maple syrup, that's the look we want for this fang," Watts says to one of his team.

Fortunately, no one has to lubricate a real-life lupine grin to get the shot Watts wants. In 300, the wolf's cuspids are a purely digital construct, as is every hair on its hide, the rocky canyon the wolf is haunting, the wintry nighttime sky overhead, and virtually every other element of the shot save for the young actor playing the animal's Spartan prey. More than a year after the human element of the scene was shot on a blue screen stage with a stand-in mechanical wolf, Watts, the movie's visual-effects supervisor, is filling in the expansive blanks with staffers at Hybride, a Quebec-based effects facility. "One nice thing about doing this on the computer," Watts says, "is that if you decide, ‘Okay, I like the hair and the eyes and everything else,' you can turn off all the other layers, and just highlight the teeth."

A WOLF IN DIGITAL CLOTHING

In today's moviemaking, the creative work that takes place on a computer can be as important as what goes on in front of the camera. In the big-screen adaptation of Frank Miller's historical graphic novel 300 (above), the future Spartan King Leonidas fends off a wolf. On set, visual-effects supervisor Chris Watts tried using a robotic wolf (top) for the scene, but it was eventually covered up by a computer-generated version of the animal (shown midrender, below).

Digital effects such as 300's virtual wolf are remarkable not because they are groundbreaking — the use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in cinema dates back to the 2D pixel-vision of a robotic Yul Brynner in 1973's Westworld — but because this technology is now a standard part of the moviemaking toolkit. The impact of digital technology on Hollywood has been gradual but all-encompassing. Today, a movie can be shot, edited and distributed — from camera to theater and beyond — without involving a single frame of film. The transformation is at least as sweeping as the introduction of sound or color in the early 20th century, and it is changing both the business and the art form of cinema. Cinematographers, long resistant to digital image recording, are starting to embrace the use of digital cameras, shooting clean-looking footage that's easier to manipulate than film. Commonly available software allows small special effects shops such as Hybride to render entire virtual worlds and blend them seamlessly with live-action shots. Scenes that would have required elaborate sets 25 years ago can now be shot against a blue or green screen, and the setting can be filled in later — and then tweaked until the director is satisfied.

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