With a staff of 95 artists, Hybride produced 540 vfx shots totaling 45 minutes, including the CG wolf that young Leonidas encounters at the beginning of the film. 

In trying to translate a book to film this literally, there's the problem of crafting the right level of reality for something that in origin was never intended to live outside the page. Watts says it was a huge issue because that meant he and his team had to be incredibly specific about their needs from the vfx houses. "If you are making a movie that's based in reality and I want an image of a plane crashing on a runway, everyone knows what that's supposed to look like. Even if I don't provide every detail of what it looks like, a lot of that can be inferred by the artists. With a movie like this, even if you show people the comic book, and Grant and I published a huge amount of style guides for his movie, by the time you filter down to the guy that's doing the compositing in whatever facility in whatever country, that reality is that what he can usually use as guidance doesn't exist in his arena. The challenge is to make these 1,300 vfx shots all fit together. They were created by 10 facilties, across three continents, in four countries. Making all of that belong in the visual universe of Frank's book was a big challenge. It's one of the reasons it took so long to finish this movie because we needed to get it right. All eyes are on the look of this movie, based on Frank's book, and based on what people have heard and what people are talking about."

The sheer volume of shots needed meant that Watts had to parcel out the work to 10 vendors, a theoretical train wreck in the making, but a necessary move in order to be productive. "I would have loved to give it all to one facility," Watts adds. "It would have made my life super easy, but unfortunately the schedule of the movie didn't permit one facility working linearly through the entire film. There was a while when we wanted to give the whole thing to a company in Australia and there was another time we wanted to give it all to a company in Montreal, but there wasn't time for one company to do all that work and have it be good. I think there is a practical limit of how many a shots a company can do and have it be good. I think you get a slightly better result, albeit with more management responsibility, if you have people working on different fronts to make it better." In the end, Montreal-based Hybride did the bulk of the work with Australia-based Animal Logic, Hydraulx, Meteor Studios, German-based Scanline VFX, Buzz Images, WB Internal, Pixel Magic, Screaming Death Monkey and Lola Visual Effects splitting the rest of the shots.

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. 

Watts says he was able to assign which vendor got what sequences based on expertise, but timing was a big consideration too. "The art and science of farming out vfx work to companies, I could go on at length about it. You do your best to consider the strengths and weaknesses of the various companies you consider to do the work. On every movie, you make your decisions and the next time you might not make the same decisions knowing what you know. It's true on any movie and it's true on 300. Some of it is defined by schedule and some is defined by a good bid or we got a really good vibe after discussing a scene. Sometimes if you like the lead supervisor at a facility, that will turn into work. Hybride ended up doing more shots than any other facility and part of that was that it was shot in Quebec and there were some tax incentives to do work there. We can get more effects work for our money if we do it in Quebec. But I'm not in it for the money and the real reason we sent so much work to Hybride was because their team was incredible. They got the movie. They did a huge amount of work on Sin City so they already understood 50% of what we were going for. They are in this little town an hour north of Montreal and you wouldn't expect these guys would end up doing most of the work on a big Hollywood movie about ancient Greece. Their style of working and the skill and knowledge and creativity of their supervisors made them a spectacular match for this movie. I can't say enough about their work."

With a staff of 95 artists, Hybride produced 540 vfx shots totaling 45 minutes, utilizing SOFTIMAGE| XSI for 3D animation, NewTek's LightWave 3D for particle effects and 3D graphics, 3D Equalizer and 2d3's boujou for tracking and stabilization. Autodesk's Infernal, Flame and Smoke were used for compositing and editing and Lustre was used for color grading of specific scenes. The work included the CG wolf that young Leonidas encounters at the beginning of the film, the gushing blood throughout the battles suggesting a spattered-ink effect, armies of 100,000 created by 30 stand-ins and different organic effects such as snow, rain and mud.