Your photos, 300-style!
Movie audiences of the world are vastly and completely amazed by the beauty of the new movie 300. With its extremely distinctive style, quick-moving plot and — like Sin City, another of my favourites — relatively closely based on one of Frank Miller’s graphical novels, it’s got it goin’ on.
If you’ve seen the film, you can’t have failed to notice the amazing quality of the artwork involved: The CGI is amazing, of course, but even the live-action bits of the film is nothing short of stunning. So, how, exactly, can you recreate the effects? We interviewed graphic artist Jason Niedle to find out more…
300 was shot entirely using blue- and green-screen, which is a technology which allows you to create the backgrounds digitally. Of course, the actors use props etc, but the fact remains that nearly 90% of all the footage used in the film involves various types of visual effects. The film was in post production for nearly a year — ages, in film industry terms.
Oh, so you’re a tech geek, are you? Well, let’s find out what IMDB tells us about the technology used:
The film was edited on an Avid, with an HD cut also maintained in Final Cut Pro The 3D was made using Maya, XSI, and Lightwave The 2D composites were made with Shake, Inferno, Fusion, and Combustion. The film makers prefer Macintosh, but large portions of the movie were made under Linux. Asset management was handled by custom software written in the Panorama development environment, made by Provue. Color management was handled by Truelight software. The film was scanned on a northlight scanner and was recorded on the arrilaser. Most of the film was shot at high speed, between 50 and 150fps. Normal film is at 24fps. The film was transferred to HD SR tape and quicktime, and HD quicktimes were the basis for the HD preview cuts. The working resolution for the film was 2K, at a working aspect ratio of 2.11 and a projected aspect ratio of 2.35.
Err, right. If anyone fancies translating that into English, feel free to post a comment. That’s totally not why we’re here, though, and I’ve let my mind wander way off track (it does that a lot recently, I blame the fact that I’ll soon be visited by my lovely girlfriend, who I haven’t seen in more than two weeks. It does weird things to my mind. Oh, I’m waffling again. But then again, as a regular reader, I’m sure you’re used to that from me by now… Right?)
How did they achieve the special look of the film? As it turns out, the directors and film editors decided to do a ‘crush’ technique. This means that you extend the blacks (’crush’) to up the contrast and make a scene look eerie.
Let’s illustrate. Starting with a straight-up photo of the lovely Christine, where she’s looking ever-so-slightly devious:
Now, to apply the ‘crush’ technique, you need to adjust the levels on your image so the black comes out stronger. Obviously, you need to do these changes only to a selection of your image, otherwise, it’ll come out way too dark.
Now, with some careful selections and some drastic image editing, you can turn this photo into something that has far higher impact and offers up a lot more contrast to work with. This is important, especially because the contrasty style of 300 would be impossible to recreate without, err, contrast.
When you’ve got the contrast right, you’ve got to start playing with the colour — it’s got to be right, after all.
When Jason saw the movie, he explains, he wanted to re-create the effect. Re-visiting a photo he took a while ago, he combined the photograph with some stock stuff, and came up with the image to the right.
“I spent a little time balancing the brightness of the images”, he recalls, such as darkening the background and making the model stand out properly. Subsequently, he added a Sepia tone to the image:
… Which brings the photograph in line with the colour feel of 300, apart from the whole ‘300 being in colour’ bit. What next? “Well, I liked the effect quite a lot, but it didn’t quite cut it. For one, it wasn’t nearly colourful enough”, Jason explains, “so I took the base image, made a copy of the layer and put it right back on top”. By using the ‘multiply’ channel layer and fine-adjusting the opacity of the new layer in Photoshop, it adds some of the colour back into the image, and amicably imitates the ‘crush’ feel of 300.
We’re getting close now, but the lighting- and director of photography of 300 had shot the film with rather dramatic lighting. In addition, a lot of the scenes in 300 has the models oiled up (or, at the very least, sweating like pigs. Wouldn’t you, in the heat of battle?), so the powerful lighting reflects off the models in a wicked way. “Basically, I added a motion blur to the background, and added it as a separate layer to the Photoshop file”, Jason explains.
The final result? Judge for yourself:
Jason suggests that the original photo could have done with more powerful, side-on lighting, but the basic feel of the 300 movie posters is there… Wouldn’t you agree?
Jason is a graphic designer and photographer based in Orange County, California. Read more of his stuff on Jasontopia. The first three images in this article are used courtesy of Warner Brothers under Fair Use / Fair Dealing, for illustrative purposes. For full-res versions and more info about the movie, check out the official 300 website.
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This entry is © Haje Jan Kamps / Photocritic.org, and was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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#1 - March 15th, 2007 at 14:25
I was just wondering if we could have some more adverts in the middle of your content. With the number you have right now I can still just about follow the story, with a few more you’d make your content completely unreadable and I could stop bothering to try to read them!
#2 - March 15th, 2007 at 16:19
TC: dude, I can add more ads if you really need me to. In fact, give us your e-mail address, and I’ll e-mail you some more advertisements. Seriously. Because that’s the kind of guy I am.
#3 - March 15th, 2007 at 16:38
(Yet on a slightly more serious note, TC, have a look at this)
#4 - March 15th, 2007 at 18:59
very cool post, now I just gotta get a picture and spend a couple hours in photoshop…. now I’ll never leave my computer :)
#5 - March 16th, 2007 at 12:40
You completely missed my sarcasm. In this one article you have 3 adverts in the middle of the content. I completely agree with you funding your site through adverts but why can’t you put them in the side bar like most people?
You have a good site with some good articles, it seems a shame to spoil them. I didn’t email you directly as the comment “You can even send press releases, if you are a company, but if they are crap, prepare to be ridiculed.” put me off giving you my real details. That attitude doesn’t really seem right for a site which is for helping people imporve their photography skills.
#6 - March 16th, 2007 at 12:50
Dear TC!:
Heh, No, dude, I totally caught your sarcasm, and turned it against you. Muuhahaha, I’m so damn witty.
I think you forget that people in general take themselves way too seriously. I’m not one of those people. hence the comment about press releases.
Of course I wouldn’t take the piss out of my regular readers, but if people send me ridiculous press releases about random stuff that is complete rubbish, then I might decide to do a write-up to highlight the fact that they’re rubbish. See it as an incentive for PR companies to do their job properly, rather than to just fire irrelevant adverts everywhichway.
As for the ads: If I stick them in the sidebar, people don’t notice them, and if people don’t notice them, they don’t click on them. If they don’t get clicked on, I may as well not bother. It’s a necessary evil, I’m afraid. If enough people made donations, or if I managed to get a bigger sponsor, then I’d strip all the ads out in a heartbeat. In the mean time, I have no other choice, I’m afraid.
No hard feelings, kid.
#7 - March 16th, 2007 at 13:31
i can’t be bought, but i’m available for rent. give me free stuff, and plenty of it
#8 - March 18th, 2007 at 17:44
You don’t care for the ads, get ad-aware and no longer see them.
Cool article and as someone above said, loks like a couple hours of PS coming up.
#9 - March 19th, 2007 at 14:05
>>Err, right. If anyone fancies translating that into English, feel free to post a comment. > The film was edited on an Avid,> with an HD cut also maintained in Final Cut Pro> The 3D was made using Maya, XSI, and Lightwave> The 2D composites were made with Shake, Inferno, Fusion, and Combustion. >The film was scanned on a northlight scanner> and was recorded on the arrilaser. >Most of the film was shot at high speed, between 50 and 150fps.>The film was transferred to HD SR tape and quicktime, and HD quicktimes were the basis for the HD preview cuts. >The working resolution for the film was 2K,>at a working aspect ratio of 2.11 >and a projected aspect ratio of 2.35.
#10 - May 27th, 2007 at 22:35
I’ll translate that bit for you! :D
The film was edited with the program “Avid” and the High-Def parts were edited in Final Cut Pro (an Apple program) . The 3D parts of the movie were made using the programs Maya, XSI, and Lightwave. The 2D parts were made with the programs Shake, Inferno, Fusion, and Combustion. The film makers prefer Apple computers, but large portions of the movie were made with Linux computers. They made some custom software to do some of their movie magic. Color management was handled by Truelight software. The film was scanned on a northlight scanner [which is just a film scanner] and was recorded on the Arrilaser [The Arrilaser is a digital film recorder made by Arri which writes digital movie files onto film after it's been edited and such]. Most of the film was shot at high speed, between 50 and 150 frames per second. Normal film is projected at 24 frames per second. The film was transferred to High-Def SR tape (just a type of tape, like Mini DV or Hi8) and quicktime files, and High-Def quicktime files were the basis for the High-Def preview cuts. The working resolution for the film was 2000 pixels (normal MiniDV resolution is 720 x 480), at a working aspect ratio of 2.11 and a projected aspect ratio of 2.35. (those are ratios, haha. Like in math. Google that bit)
Hope that helped any confused people!
#11 - June 26th, 2007 at 19:21
Nice pictures!
I particularly annoyed by the advert commenter. I am not against advertisements as long as they are in their own distinct boxes so that I will not be fooled by it. It is advertisements that fund the site and keep it running. There are so many good and free resources out there that have advertisements and that’s life. The only way to avoid it is to close your eyes lol.
#12 - July 29th, 2007 at 15:00
i have also tried to capture the look of the movie….did not turn out that bad
http://www.24-7media.de/pics/300.jpg
#13 - October 7th, 2007 at 00:03
NiK Color effects has a plugin(one of the whole set) which can immitate this look.
Wonderwaffe, you did a nice job. Don’t know what you did,but it’s right on the money!
Dmitri
#14 - March 23rd, 2008 at 03:13
Looks positively hideous it does, mate. Banal video-game like colour graphics of that sort are the cancer killing summer films.