300, which became the juggernaut of this spring’s box office, is based on renowned graphic novelist Frank Miller’s comic book. An epic tale of passion, courage, freedom, and sacrifice embodied by the Spartan warriors who fought at Thermopylae, 300 brings one of history’s greatest, bloodiest battles to life. Co-written and directed by Zack Snyder, 300 launches from Miller’s graphic novel to show audiences a stunning, never-seen-before vision. Snyder is a Cal-Arts grad who directed "Dawn of the Dead" and a plethora of commercials. Combining live action and virtual sets and backgrounds that capture Miller’s distinct vision of this ancient tale, 300 alters visual expectations.

300’s journey to the screen began with tests Snyder prepared as a proof of concept for Warner Brothers. Snyder and producers Gianni Nunnari and Mark Canton were dedicated to getting the film made, but Warner Brothers was a bit "…iffy, having recently witnessed mixed outcomes on ‘Alexander’ and ‘Troy.’ Warner Bros was also worried about an R-rating, which was absolutely part of Zack’s vision," said Watts.

"Zack didn’t plan on just telling the story; he planned on bringing the comic book to life-literally." In the beginning, nobody actually understood what that meant. So, Snyder hired some actors, borrowed shields and costumes from "Troy" and went onto a blue screen stage. With help from an Animalogic visual effects artist, they created a test that became a talking piece for Zack and the producers. When Chris DeFaria from Warners showed it to Watts, he was hard at work on "Corpse Bride." A year later, Watts was on board.

Carse noted that the surreal, photographic style for the movie came right off the page of the graphic novel. Watts had already seen Miller’s book when he saw the first tests, "It didn’t really register that this would be the visual inspiration for the film. It wasn’t until Zack showed me Grant Freckelton’s concept art that I realized what we were going for, and I got it, this is why it looks so weird. This movie will look a lot like the comic book."

Initially, Watts said, the movie was going to be shot in Australia. "But the winds of international finance dictated it would go to Canada. We shot the majority of 300 in a Montreal warehouse in the dead of winter." Even though the production change put Animalogic out of the equation, they gracefully allowed conceptual visual effects artist Grant Freckleton to remain part of the production.

As production on 300 began in Montreal, the challenges became apparent. "Almost everything was shot on a small soundstage; other than two days in LA, production was in Montreal. We shot 61 days; sixty on the stage and one day outside for some horseback shots."

Carse had heard about Snyder’s storyboarding process. Watts recalled that "Zack would draw production comic books. Drawing the storyboards wasn’t just about the visuals for the film, it became part of the writing process. He wrote the movie by drawing the storyboards."

After Snyder finished the drawings, they were handed off to a professional storyboard artist. These were an invaluable resource, conveying the essence of what he wanted to put into the movie from the book. Then, Snyder, Watts, DP Larry Fong, Production Designer Jim Bissell, Grant Freckelton and producers Jeff Silver and Debbie Snyder went through each scene in the storyboard to figure out exactly how to accomplish every shot.

Were there scenes that just couldn’t get accomplished given the time, location and budget?

Absolutely, conceded Watts. "There were some great shots that had to be abandoned because there wasn’t enough room on the stage to shoot them. Our main stage was just 70 feet by 200 feet and it had columns. That’s not very big, and columns can’t get removed just by painting them blue; the space has to be replaced. So, we bluescreened a few shots with columns, but we couldn’t shoot everything we had wanted, because the stage had limitations. In the wide shots where you see people running at camera, that was all shot on that tiny stage. We used every single inch of that stage. The horse guys were fearless. They just galloped right up to the bluescreen and stopped at the very last second."

Carse was curious about the choice of bluescreen over greenscreen, "It doesn’t seem like a very green movie!" Watts explained that actually, "there’s almost no green in the movie, Zack hates trees. There are a few shrubs and vegetables in Sparta and there’s one brown tree at the end of a scene. There were a few places where it would have been great to replace the area by just putting a tree in."

Ultimately, the production opted for bluescreen for technical reasons. "If you’re shooting red capes, greenscreen presents problems on film stock with yellow print and that showed up as an issue in our tests. Also, we found that the amount of light reflected off the green caused our screens to be a bit overexposed. It became apparent that bluescreen was the right path for us."

In the new era of digital production, Carse asked if shooting 300 digitally had been an option. "Zack and Larry were always going to shoot on film and I always wanted to shoot on film," said Watts. "There was a desire from some of the producers to try HD because of real or imagined economic advantages to shooting digitally. But the thing that sold film for us was our extensive use of high speed; so much of the movie is shot at 150 frames per second and there’s no HD technology to handle that."

Watts describes the post-production process as "huge." "In the final version of the movie, there were 1523 cuts and 1306 of them contain some kind of visual effect. While that’s less than other movies I’ve done, this movie was considerably more difficult. "Pleasantville" was essentially one gag repeated in 200 digital effects shots. But in 300, almost every shot was a unique gag that required original thinking. We had a department of about 20 people during production that covered the first and second units, and post-production was set up in L.A. We had two visual effects editors, a final cut editor, and three or four coordinating producers. So, this was a small production, but there were a lot of people working on the movie."

Watts also noted a global network of suppliers. "We had 10 vendors in four countries on three continents working on shots. Some vendors had just one shot, but other vendors had massive work. Hybrid did upwards of 700 shots, for example."

The movie prepped for sixty days, and there was extensive planning to "figure out the look before we shot it. We thought about how to design the physical layout of the sets, design what the shots should look like, how they were going to be lit. Then, the lighting rigs had to be built," concluded Watts.

Post production was a year long process. With a hard delivery date, the production was up against the wall when a major vendor suffered a meltdown at the last minute "We were required to finish at the end of November,2006. When it became apparent to all of us that a key vendor wasn’t going to deliver, we jumped in and got a bit of an extension, but it didn’t give us much more time."

Watts agrees that one of the key difficulties of any major effects project is asset management, and has developed a system to help manage the process. "It’s a program called Panorama, which you can probably find on the internet. Half the job of a movie as big as "Pleasantville" or "300" is just keeping track of the assets. That is how we accomplished this with such a small department. Tracking and managing assets is essentially automated now."

The editors, who were cutting on an Avid, delivered an Avid list that was loaded into Panorama. That would generate a final cut XML that would be used to assemble the whole movie in a matter of minutes. As long as the editor had cut effects in, you would be able to see the final cut version very quickly. That became part of our daily review process, and with a couple of hundred shots coming in each day, we could see them as they arrived and were integrated into the cut.

Whenever they were in doubt about a visual choice, Watts, Snyder, and Freckelton went back to the graphic novel. "The first question was, ‘what would Frank do?’ then Zack and Grant would figure it out, and Larry and I got to make it move."

Production elements, like blood, became critical. "In the book, from the cover and on every page, there’s no ‘clean’ blood; there’s debris and other junk flying around. Zack wanted to preserve that throughout the movie and no matter how many ways you explain it to your vendors, there are going be differences. So we published style guides, which became a kind of visual effects Thomas Guide. I’m happy with the way the blood turned out; there are definitely people who want to see shiny blood, but we compared it, and it just wasn’t as cool for this movie." The blood was critical on a non-creative level, as well, Watts said. "Perhaps because the comic book blood didn’t look so real, and and we created non-realistic blood to match the book, the ratings guys didn’t hit us with an NC-17."

The style guides got the production what they wanted, and became an essentially simple process for training each vendor.

Carse noted the very stylized look of the movie, and how commentators have discussed the "crush" process and grain structure. The grain structure is something that Watts had wanted to improve; but budget, vendors, and time prevented his ability to hit the level he’d hoped for. Snyder and Watts decided to use the flaw as part of the art. "We shot on 5229, which is a low contrast stock with really fine grain structure. We didn’t always get the benefit of that and had major, ongoing issues with grain. We worked on minimizing the grain until moments before we turned the film in. In this process, we developed "the crush," which I’d like to explain as a sophisticated, complex process. But, in reality, it was just a way to crush the blacks, clip the whites, and play with the saturation until it looked good." The goal was always to make it look like the comic book, so we did embrace some of these difficulties as part of the art. The complexity of what they did, according to Watts, "has in some cases been exaggerated."

The visual palette of 300 includes extensive use of speed effects. Different methods were tried and tested, including an optical flow version, the AVID version blending frames, and a version with dropped frames that made the images jump around. The popular vote chose the drop frame-jump around version, which wouldn’t have been Watts’ first choice.

A number of challenging and ultimately rewarding scenes were created for 300. Watts recalled the boat scene where the Spartans arrive at the gates, and turn to watch the boats crashing at sea as pivotal. "The studio was convinced that we couldn’t film the shots. It was way too expensive, but we realized the boats had to be shown crashing. You can’t have guys look out to sea and not show the boats. There wasn’t money to show model boats or build a tank, and there wasn’t time in the production to shoot it. Boyd Shermis, who did ‘Poseidon,’ introduced me to Scanline and their software, FlowLine, that does fluid simulations. These had never been tried on such a huge scale but I liked that they used real Navier-Stokes equations, the fluid dynamics equations used in fluid simulations. What Scanline does better than anybody else is large scale water movement, like whitecaps, whitewash, spray and foam, without looking like separate elements. These shots are really expensive and time consuming, but they did a great job for our budget."

Carse asked Watts about the Wolf scene, occurring early in 300. Leonidas is sent into the wilderness where he comes across a wolf. The creation of that scene, according to Watts, was one of the most challenging in the movie, the first introduction into the digital environment. "Making that wolf look great became a top priority, and we decided on a robot wolf which performed outstandingly. But the robot only had a head and front torso so it couldn’t walk around, or do what a real wolf would do. We knew that we had to make a CG wolf to match the robot wolf and that was challenging. Every shot where we cut back to the wolf required a different reaction. The wolf is stalking Leonidas, so you cut to him, cut to the wolf, cut to Leonidas, etc. Deciding how to vary the wolf’s reactions became essential. Watching footage of real wolves showed us how they move and react. It worked. In the final feature, there are no robot wolves, they were all covered up by our CG wolves."

There are almost no photographed backgrounds in 300, only the scenes in Sparta. According to Watts, 300’s narrative device is a visual correlation between the action and the background; the storyteller exaggerates and the more he exaggerates, the crazier the sets get. "In Sparta before the legend unfolds, there’s not much exaggeration, and we wanted it to look as real as possible. That location was essentially created on the computer. There are 2 D matte paintings, Grant’s drawings, and little bits and pieces we shot that were comped together." As the movie unfolds and the story grows more chaotic, the effects and design become more intense.

In remembering the production, key elements made the project profoundly rewarding. The challenge of shooting a girl on a bluescreen underwater, made more difficult by her diaphanous gown. But for all of its complexities, the final result is a stunning and integral part of the story.

Watts and Snyder also embraced differences from vendors as part of the evolving story, making it part of the narrative. There are four battles in the movie, and each looked different from different vendors. At a certain point, Watts said, "we decided that it was okay that they were different, they were from different points in the story. The different look made sense to the story we were trying to convey. Ultimately, we brought the comic book to life, and that is what we all wanted from the beginning."