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Director Zack Snyder's priority in adapting Frank Miller's graphic novel 300 for the big screen was to literally take Miller and Lynn Varley's original vision from the page and create it on film. All images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

When director Zack Snyder (Dawn of the Dead) decided to adapt Frank Miller's graphic novel 300 for the big screen, opening March 9 from Warner Bros. and playing on select IMAX screens, he was adamant about not taking the typical sword-and-sandal path. A huge fan of Miller and Lynn Varley's original book, Snyder wanted to literally take their vision from the page and create it on film. Under Snyder's specific direction and focused vision, the graphic tale of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. is brought to life as a living canvas, with the color palette, images and artistic tone of the book lovingly recreated for a whole new medium. "With 300, what I asked of the vendors and of the artists that worked on the film was to give me a painting," Snyder suggests and that's exactly what he got. Like its predecessor in technique, Robert Rodriguez's Sin City, 300 experiments with what the digital backlot can create in terms of virtual environments for film, while also representing a giant leap forward in using the technology to push artistic boundaries.

As is fitting in producing an epic, Snyder employed a battalion of artists, compositors, visual effects technicians and consultants around the world to bring 300 to life frame-by-frame. Shot in Montreal for 60 days in the summer of 2005, since then Snyder and his visual effects supervisor Chris Watts worked with 10 vfx companies around the world to create the movie's 1,300 visual effects shots, which were then amazingly edited together into one cohesive film. VFXWorld talked to Snyder, Watts and two of the vfx houses -- Animal Logic and Screaming Death Monkey -- to get the story on how 300 came together...

Snyder's Vision
Exhausted from the sheer marathon of getting 300 completed by its release date, it's surprising to find that Snyder is still able to retain his ever-positive and enthusiastic demeanor this late in the production game. Tired but not beaten, Snyder is able to dig into the secrets of how he brought it all together -- the foremost being pre-prep and surrounding himself with people that "got" his vision. "For me, the thing that I had going for me was that the artists that worked on this movie, a lot of them are fans of the graphic novel anyway," the director explains. "I think they felt as much responsibility to make it good as I did and that goes a long way. And I really feel like the most important thing was that when we got on the set that we had done so much work beforehand. We had done a bunch of visual work but it was more theoretical. I knew something would work in theory, like if I put snow in the background, and from there, atmosphere and sky beyond that, so that when I comp it together it would work. That is the stuff you have to be confident about and once you [have achieved] that, then the rest of it is downhill. I've got to say that I was also so confident in Chris and (visual effects art director) Grant [Freckelton] to get what I wanted that I didn't have [any] fear. I did early on," he chuckles, "but when I started to see the shots come in, they were in the wheelhouse of my expectations. It surprised me but also made me happy."

Snyder admits that seeing the iconic shot of a young future King Leonidas face a menacing wolf in a finished sequence gave him a huge confidence boost. "It was that beautiful Frank frame with the boy and the wolf. They are facing off with the wolf to the left and the boy to the right -- it's a classic shot from the book. When I saw it early on, I said, 'This is gonna be cool. This is gonna be OK,' even when it was still rough animation."

Asked to single out the most difficult shot to create, Snyder offers, "The one shot that was hard to do was the Stelios/Astinos fight sequence, which was right at the end of battle three. Right before Astinos gets his head chopped off, there's a long 360? Steadicam shot that goes around them as they fight. It's pretty gory and it's crazy and just a difficult thing to do choreography and film-wise. They had to knit the actual stage to the background. It was just a hard job and right up until the very end I was like, 'Come on guys! It's a little hairy here!' But they pulled it together and it's great."

Watts Tames the VFX Beast
The man charged with taming the visual effects beast known as post-production for 300 was Watts. "I've worked for Warner Bros. on a few movies (The Fog) and I was originally approached on this by Chris deFaria, who is head of visual effects and animation for Warner Bros," Watts explains. "We go way back and he told me about the movie a couple years ago when it was still in development. It was supposed to be shot completely in Australia so I was sad about that but got over it," he jokes. "But in the summer of 2005, Chris called up and said, 'Hey, 300 is going to shoot in Montreal. Do you want to do it?" At the time I was working on another film but I wasn't under contract. So I met Zack and looked at the book and looked at the script and I knew I had to do it. Zack's vision for the book was awesome and I could just see what we needed to do. I work great with Zack and we totally clicked. From that point on it was me and Zack, Jim Bissell (the production designer) and [visual effects art director] Grant Freckelton, who was one of the original concept artists. [Grant] was a huge factor in the look of the movie -- his concept art was one of the things that really sold me."