The Spartans used Apples

ByMike Moffit

Ok, maybe it wasn’t the Spartans who used Apples but the people who created the multi-million-dollar box office hit 300 did! This past weekend Keith and I went to see this movie. When watching the opening a closing credits I was thinking to myself about how the cool effects were created and thought that it must have been done with Motion or one of those really cool Apple Pro applications.

While sifting through the news on Digg.com yesterday I saw an article titled ‘300: Creating the visual effects’. The article talks about how 300 was made. Something that I found to be really cool was that most scenes were done by filming the actors and then the entire background and most things were created in CGI. The shooting of the movie only took 60 days but the post-production took about a year!

Final Cut Pro, Shake and Combustion are a few of the high-end applications that were used to create the amazing visual effects. They also used QuickTime HD. The 300 team used 15 G5s and used about 16 terabytes of space for the whole project!

If you haven’t seen this movie yet, I really recommend it. One last mind-blowing bit, in the beginning of the movie, when the army is in the wheat field, that entire field is computer generated. That army is really standing in-front of a green screen and all the plants and everything is computer generated…amazing isn’t it!

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