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Ridley Scott's Robin Hood origin story starring Ridley Scott and Cate Blanchett may not be a vfx-intensive action film, but that didn't stop MPC from creating noteworthy CG work involving armies, boats, environments and arrows.

In fact, MPC generated 578 out of 800 total vfx shots under the supervision of Richard Stammers (in collaboration with sister company Technicolor India, which provided matchmoving and roto work). The remaining compositing, replacement and other enhancements were done by Lola Visual Effects, Hammerhead, Nvizible and The Senate.

"We always knew there was going to be a certain amount of CG work, taking on bigger sequences," Stammers suggests. "For example: the French invasion off the coast of England. When we were discussing this early on, Ridley talked about a large invasion fleet of maybe 400 boats and thousands of French troops, so obviously we knew there was never going to be a practical way to achieve all of that. Even with eight practical boats and 500 extras, we still had to add to that with a CG fleet of 200 ships and 6,000 soldiers. A lot of the time, Ridley's shooting style creates an amazing palette of great shots to work with to the point where sometimes you're not adding anything to the background, and other times it's just filling in some of the gaps. He was very pragmatic about what we had to do."

To create the invading French Armada and the ensuing battle with the English army, MPC used Alice, its proprietary crowd generation software to simulate the rowing and disembarkation of French soldiers and horses, with all water interactions being generated using FlowLine software. The defending English archers and cavalry were also replicated with CG Alice generated clips and animated digital doubles. MPC relied predominately on its existing MoCap library, but a special two-week MoCap shoot at Pinewood was arranged to gather additional motion clips of rowing, disembarking troops and horses.

"We had one scenario that put us into a little bit of a technical challenge," Stammers adds. "Ridley needed the CG guys to come closer to camera because the practical stuff wasn't able to achieve that. So we were left in a position where we had to go back to our original assets and up res all the details in the models and the textures and additional post animation simulations on top of our motion capture library. We needed to create some additional nuances for the fact that we were using so many similar animations so close to camera. It worked out really well in the end and is a good hero shot."