Detailing the visual standards and post pipeline they developed to help facilitate all of the various vendors, Watts explains, "We also went to some pretty big lengths to establish what we wanted this movie to look like visually. Grant would do these concept paintings before we shot anything at all. Grant, Zack, Jim, [dp] Larry Fong and I would talk about it and go and shoot that part of the movie. Once it was shot, we immediately provided Grant with high-res stills from the material. For every major camera angle we included in the film, Grant would do fairly rough concept paintings from those. They had nice looking backgrounds in terms of color palette and background fidelity. There was a one-day turnaround for them. We would then bring them to the set to show the crew and then send them to the facilities as part of the bid. Editorial would have them to understand the tone of what was intended for the scene and when the scenes were farmed to the vendors they had all the concept paintings for the whole movie on a website that we created especially for that purpose. It was called Leo, and that was a resource for all our vendors and they were able to consult that at anytime.

"When they sent us back QTs, they were loaded into our asset manager, which is built on a program called Panorama by a company called Previa. It's all drag and drop and it all gets ingested and into the pipeline. It keeps track of if I looked at it and whether Zack looked at it and whether it's going to get cut into the movie or cut into a sub clip on editorial. There are all these decision trees that happen in the asset manager and then it goes and talks to Base Camp, which is essentially a publishing system for all our vendors. If I look at a shot, I can tag it as being temp or final, along with comments in Panorama. I press a button and it gets uploaded to Base Camp and then the facilities can see the history of all the shots and all the shots in the sequence and they can use that as the basis for the next version. Hybride also has a piece of software called Hysync. They usually only use it for their own clients but they were considerate enough to allow us to license Hysync to use with all our vendors and that allowed us to let the vendor and the client have identical sets of QTs all over the world. Hysync was a huge tool, so the combination of being super organized with a good asset management system and a good way to convey information to the vendors through Leo and Base Camp and the all important personal aspect of talking to the supervisors by looking at the images through Hysync, we kept it together pretty well."

Yet, with 10 different houses with hundreds of different artists creating a surreal world with no concrete reality on which to base their images means a lot of different looks were going to filter back to Watts and Snyder. Watts says that absolutely became an issue. "We had every facility develop the look on their own. We then mushed them all together to make it look like one look. It might not be the way I would do it next time, but it worked pretty well. We got a Hot Gates, which was pretty consistent. But the more difficult aspect of maintaining consistency across different vendors was [subtler]. It was lighting and atmosphere, which made it clear to us that it would not be that easy. Zack and I looked at the work we were getting from various vendors and said, 'We can do one of two things: We can force the stuff to look the same or we can embrace the differences and use them to tell a more interesting story." And that's what we ended up doing. There were four battles in the movie and each was done by a different vendor. Animal Logic did Battle One. Hybride did Battle Two. Hydraulx did Battle Three and Pixel Magic did Battle Four. Three of them happen during the day and one happens at night, and they all have completely different looks to them. It's not what I would have thought I wanted, but it evolved as we were starting to do the work...They look different in Frank's book and you don't want to show people four of the same thing. It was the strategy there and I think it worked well. It was hard and the latitude to allow them to be different from one another was not that wide. It still had to look like Frank's book, but it really paid off for the audience. They are expecting the same thing and instead see something completely different. I've seen it with a couple preview audiences and during the battle scenes they are freaking out!"

For the Oracle sequence, Screaming Death Monkey had to recreate the practical set in 3D as well as the sky and other environment elements. The comp was difficult because they had to match "wet for dry." 

Reflecting on his favorite sequences, Watts says, "I think what we call the 'Crazy Horse' shot in Battle One, which is the long side angle shot of Gerard Butler [as King Leonidas] in his battle montage was an amazing achievement. It was really hard to photograph and put together. It's a gigantic shot. It's made of six different concurrent photographic elements, shot at high speed. It's got all digital backgrounds, spears and blood -- that was a huge achievement. Also, a couple shots that Scanline did of some Persian ships crashing against the rocks, I was really happy with that because it was a scene that everybody knew would be really expensive. Nobody was quite sure how to shoot it, so there was some pressure to cut it out of the movie. People were saying it's too expensive, but Zack and I both said, 'You can't do a reverse to nothing. You have to have the boats. We can't cut it out.' All eyes were on us as we tried to figure it out. We decided to go all CG because there was no tank facility to shoot it and there was no budget to build a giant boat model. No one believed it could be done, but we teamed up with Scanline of Germany, which did some water work on Poseidon. They got it. We showed them the frame from the book and if you compare the frame from the book to the frame from the movie, it's just amazing how they did it. Not only did they make completely convincing water and ships, but they also went through the trouble to make all this secondary animation of Persians falling off masts and smashing on rocks. When people start watching this on DVD, I think they will really appreciate the amount of effort that went into those shots because there is so much action happening. It's a 115 frame shot so people won't see it in the movie, but on DVD people will be stunned when they see it."