A storm at sea sequence is seen in the graphic novel, in concept art and in storyboard drawing.

Animal Logic -- The 300 Style and Battle One
Freckelton became a key component in translating Miller's style to the screen. He came on early in the testing phase explaining, "I had previously art directed a 90-second 300 test produced by Animal Logic in early '05, back before the film was greenlit. It was a success in terms of proving that 300 was going to be a highly stylized, bombastic action film, but it was also hastily produced and there wasn't much time for stylistic experimentation.

"In the last weeks of pre-production, I was given an open slate by Zack to pitch ideas anything that I thought might be cool for the film. Up until then, I had been doing a lot of Photoshop illustrations for 300's art department, but I hadn't been given much free reign to 'go crazy' (as Zack would say) with the vfx side of things. At the same time, every department was doing technical tests downstairs, so there were reams of footage of actors in proper costumes and makeup standing in front of bluescreens. So I started painting up backdrops in Photoshop, then using After Effects, I'd comp the test footage, and apply 'crush' color treatment. Naturally some of these tests turned out to be duds, but some became our first real insight into what the final product was going to look like. These test comps were valuable not only from a visual effects perspective, but they also displayed the culmination of every department's efforts in creating 300's unique style.

"There was one occasion where I was designing the mountains that surrounded Sparta," Freckelton continues. "I had found some reference images of the Taygetos Mountains that surround Sparta. I painted a keyframe based on these real mountains and presented it to Zack. He responded in his usual joking manner, 'Are you crazy? These mountains look like a real place. I mean: this image looks like something you'd see in a real movie.' I was amused at his response, but also a little bit confused. I replied, 'Well... I based them on real photos of Sparta.' He just shook his head and said, 'Well that was your first mistake right there.' That pretty much summed up Zack's visual aesthetic on the film: If it looked like it could be a real place, rendered in a realistic way, then chances were it didn't belong in 300. He also made it clear that he wanted it to feel like Frank and Lynne's art brought to life, particularly in terms of palette and texture."

Freckelton continued developing the look for the duration of the film and even co-created the style guides used by all the vendors on the film. "The process of taking these ideas and disseminating them amongst dozens of vfx artists became the real challenge on the film. When it became obvious that some of the stranger aesthetic choices we were making needed more in-depth explanations, we started creating style guides. There were several style guides covering topics such as landscape, skies and blood. They were basically PDF files that were full of images and text explaining our aesthetic and technical approach to various vfx elements in the film, so that an artist who knew nothing about 300 could read them and get their head into the style of movie. Take the digital blood for example. In pre-production, I had pitched the idea of what we called '2D' blood to Zack. It was inspired by an awesome little animation produced by a design company called Lobo. They animated a bloody axe murder in a graphic, illustrative way by adding parallax to comic frames. The actual murder was nothing but splatters of ink, animated in z space much like the splatters that Miller and Varley use in 300. The result was violent and bloody, but it looked like a comic brought to life, which is exactly what we were trying to do in 300. Zack was excited by this idea, but obviously there's a difference between a graphic illustrative animation and a film shot with real people. A few hours later he dropped some footage at my desk, because he had raced downstairs and filmed himself being slashed by one of the Spartans and wanted to see how this 2D effect might work on a live-action plate. With no ink handy, I went into the kitchen and splattered some balsamic vinegar on printer paper, then scanned it in, and proceeded to animate these ink splats in After Effects, over the footage of Zack. The result was pretty cool, it was clearly a violent image, but it wasn't brutal, or realistic and it also showed how we could adapt some of the aesthetics of the Miller/Varley illustration style into the actual film.

"Come post-production, we had to try and explain this concept to all the vendors. A lot of visual effects artists are trained to strive for reality, so if you say to them, 'We need to add in digital blood into this scene,' then they start thinking in terms of squib footage, or fluid simulations or other traditional blood techniques. If you say 'We want to make the blood look like 2D blood, OK, not so much 2D blood as 3D blood that looks like 2D paint splatters... but it is shaded and needs to be integrated into the scene,' quite rightfully a lot of artists end up wondering what on earth you're talking about. We found it was a lot easier to explain the idea of the blood in a style guide, where I could point to images from the comic and point to tests we had produced, and talk about possible ways of executing the effect. It was a more efficient method of communication."