theluis [dot] com

300 came out three days ago and made $70 million over the weekend. And is one of the best movies I have ever seen due to the fact that is completely different from any other movie. Almost no other movie compares to massive amounts of style, violence, and amazing scenes that you will see in 300. If you do anything this week, see this movie. If you haven’t heard about 300 here is a basic idea of what it is about. Based on a Frank Miller novel, just like Sin City, it was made by taking footage of the actors and then basically making the background completely CGI. It is based on the Battle of Thermopylae where 300 Spartans and some other soldiers fought against King Xerxes and his Persian army of 170,000. You can view the HD trailer for 300 here.

Creating the visual effects for 300

The movie took only 60 days to shoot and was done on a green screen in Montreal. For the actors to get in shape for the movie they went through very rigorous training for 6 weeks before shooting started. Post production took almost a year and took 10 visual effects companies from three different continents. It was edited entirely with Avid and Final Cut Pro. All the 3D effects were done in Maya, XSI, and Lightwave. The 2D effects were done with Shake, Inferno, Fusion, and Combustion. All of the color management was done with Truelight software. Another interesting fact is that most of the film was shot at 50fps to 150fps. This is much higher than most films. The film was transferred to HD SR tape and Quicktime, with Quicktime being used for the HD preview cuts. Macs were preferred by the filmmakers of 300. Even though Final Cut Pro was not the main editing software used for 300 it was preferred over Avid. Shake was also the main program used for the 2D effects and Quicktime HD was the choice for movie previews. The main visual effects team that worked on 300 said that they used 15 G5’s for creating all of the visual effects, and ended up using 16 terabytes of disc space for the entire project.

The film was never meant to be historically correct. They changed some details to make it more of an action movie. (Info from IMDB)