CafeFX took a shot that wasn't working in edit, and turned it into a 14-second pull-out of a demolished village with a hook to one of Hydraulx's shots. 

"The last piece they wanted us to show a temple where the monks are living," Braet continues. "However, what wasn't established in the movie is where the temple is and what connection does it have. We created a shot that would show the arena for the fighters and then come back to the temple that is overseeing the whole city. We made this contrast of a pretty wide shot of the city and the arena, which is modern, and then slowly we go very close into the old temple which was very cultural. We didn't have enough time to make it so we had to come up with a lot of different ways to make it visually stimulating. We ended up using a lot of matte paint work."

Due to CafeFX's late addition to the post process, Nicholson says they "definitely had to crunch to get it all done. We put some good hours on the show. We had a very small crew starting with only three people and by the end it was just [Danny and me]. Our artists tailed off as we progressed dwindling down to one 3D and one compositor finishing the show. We had to pull out all the stops. The last shot that we did was a massive exterior shot where you could see an entire valley and the city. It was gigantic where we go up a mountain to a symbol at the top. We had a lot of modeling and a lot of tricks to make the city look huge, without having to create a huge city, which is where a lot of the matte paintings came in. We created a lot of building procedurally rather than try to model them perfectly and then did a lot of projection of matte paintings onto the geometry to limit the texturing.

A final shot required modeling and a lot of tricks to make the city look huge, which is where a lot of the matte paintings came in. 

"With the lighting we did a lot with the textures that we were baking into the projections which limited our render times a little bit. But as we got up the hill it was a completely CG environment where everything was CG in 3D so there was a lot of procedural texturing. When we got to the temple we went back to projected textures supplemented with actual CG lighting."

Going back to the opening shot that flew from the clouds, Braet explains that hookup point for their shot with Hydraulx's shot happened in the ethereal clouds, which made the matching rather seamless. "The only difficulty was a device called a grenade which glows and explodes in the air. The timing was set by them and ours was a little bit different so we had to play around with the timings. But I have to say we have done a few projects where we have to share with Hydraulx and these guys are great. They are very open and a good symbiosis."

Tara Bennett is an East Coast-based writer whose articles have appeared in publications such as SCI FI Magazine, SFX and Lost Magazine. She is the author of the books 300: The Art of the Film and 24: The Official Companion Guide: Seasons 1-6.