Director Ed Zwick and Okun worked together to ensure that the battles looked real but that the crew and actors remained safe.

The palace was first revealed in a boom shot up Tokyo Street, where Algren and Simon Graham, the British historian played by Timothy Spall, are walking. The palace was supposed to be prominent in the shot. Instead, it blended in with all the other buildings. “We ended up having to stretch reality by making larger it than it was, by making it more stories taller than it was, by making it on a mountain or a raised hillside, by moving it into a more crowded part of the city than it should be, by adding a certain amount of colorful flags to it so that the eye would go to it. All of them shameful things to do,” admits Okun, “but in the filmic world [they] were necessary.”

In that sequence Okun used a combination of matte painting and 3D buildings, a lot of warping and projecting textures onto 3D shapes in order to flesh the shot out and give it the kind of depth that they needed. But the filmmakers always had to keep in mind that this movie had to play in Tokyo, which is a real life place, and they were limited by how much they could fictionalize it, which put added pressure on Okun and his team of visual effects artists. In addition, the opening scenes in San Francisco, where Algren agrees to go to Japan to train the Imperial Army, also presented a problem. But this one was especially serious since it occurred after the film was shot and edited.

“After we cut the whole movie together and played it, we realized the first act needed to open up in scope. It was all interiors,” Okun explains. “So, we went out and did a one-day shoot for that new scene that takes place in the alley behind the convention center and a couple of other pick ups. Literally, we had four weeks to throw that matte painting together.” They solved the problem by supplying Craig Barren’s Matte World in San Francisco with costumes so they could shoot various elements. “The cable cars are completely 3D objects, and the city is a multi-planed matte painting back there. Not only is it one of the best matte paintings I’ve ever seen, but Ed and cinematographer John Toll agreed that we could play this, not in the middle of the day, but as a sunset shot, where we’re able to hide a lot of things you’d normally expect to see.”

To keep the battle scenes safe, Okun added muzzle blasts and shooting arrows during post.

At times, Okun had five separate visual effects production units working, with visual effects producer Tom Boland acting as a second supervisor covered one of the units, and another second supervisor, Tom Smith, covered a second unit, so that Okun only had to divide himself between three units.

Not surprisingly, the final battle sequence posed the most challenging visual effects production of the film. “We did everything from having CG arrows that go and stick into people, to planting arrows on people then painting them out, then having a CG arrow morph into the real arrow. Painting death on people [by] putting prosthetics on them, then painting them off, then revealing them. To using CG people to be blown apart, to using CG horses to be shot and killed.”

Rising Sun Pictures worked with Okun to create the nighttime ninja attack.

The sequence shows how closely the stunt crew and visual effects people worked. “The whole game was: How do we ramp the stunts up to the next level but at the same time keep the reality of the battle, which Ed was a stickler about, and keep the immediacy of it? He didn’t want to have a movie fight.” That meant Zwick didn’t want to see combatants merely fall down and die. “Many who were already wounded or have something sticking out of them get up and continue to fight,” Okun observes. “We moved in even closer to see the faces in the fight because it’s a basic tenant of the Samurai way of life that you must look into the eyes of your enemy.” Of course, it also came down to a matter of safety. “You don’t want to have 500 guys running around with loaded weapons and arrows shooting helter-skelter, so we handled all that, added muzzle blasts and everything else into it that we could just to make it as chaotic as possible and as horrible as possible.”