With Kingdom of Heaven, MPC turns a hat trick for vfx work on sword and sandal movies. All images ™ and © 2005 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved. Photos courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox.

Just when you thought you had seen the mother of all battles, Hollywood delivers yet another combat scene of unprecedented scale. After The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Troy and Alexander, fans of epic movies will have their eyes wide opened for the sequence of the siege of Jerusalem in Twentieth Century Fox’s Kingdom of Heaven (opening today, May 6, 2005). This new sword and sandal epic is brought to us by Ridley Scott, the filmmaker who single handedly revived the genre with Gladiator. Inspired by his lost-in-development-hell Crusades project, Kingdom of Heaven tells the tale of a tormented young knight (Orlando Bloom), who embarks upon a life-changing journey to defend Jerusalem from the advancing troops of Saladin.

Incidentally, the battle scenes of Troy, Alexander and Kingdom of Heaven all have one element in common: they were realized, in part or completely, by The Moving Picture Co. (MPC) in London. For the Scott movie, the effort was supervised by Tom Wood (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets), who also served as 2D supervisor: “We worked with overall visual effects supervisor Wesley Sewell (visual effects editor of Pirates of the Caribbean) and produced about 440 shots, but the final cut will probably feature 380 of them only. Several effects sequences ended up on the cutting room floor when the first cut came in at three-and-a-half hours. The project was really interesting as it gave us an opportunity to take the technology that we had just developed for Troy to a new level. The project was presented to us in winter 2003, several months before the Wolfgang Petersen movie was released, but our new crowd simulation software was already starting to generate some buzz in the industry. Several other effects companies in the U.K. were bidding on the show, but it seemed that our approach was the most sophisticated. We were officially awarded the project in February 2003 with an initial slate of 250 shots.” Other studios collaborating on the effort included Double Negative, which produced about 150 shots, and Framestore CFC with about 20 shots.

Vfx supervisor Tom Wood (left) and CG supervisor Gary Brozenich suggest that a main difference between KOH and Troy was the nature of the battle.

Pushing the Technology
For everyone at MPC, the initial thought was that Kingdom of Heaven would largely rely on the tool set that had been developed for Troy: instead of two armies battling in front of the walls of Troy, it would be one army attacking the other one behind the walls of Jerusalem… Not much of a difference, right? Surprisingly, the two projects required very different approaches. “At MPC, the general opinion was that Troy was a 3D project and that 2D was basically assembling it,” recalls Wood. “On the other hand, Kingdom of Heaven was a project in which 2D was actually producing the content. The other difference was the nature of the battle. On Troy, we had two armies violently interacting with each other, with random movements and a lot of individual actions. On Kingdom of Heaven, the focus of the simulation was on the Saracen army approaching, and then laying siege to the city. It meant we had to carry out a much more organized army simulation, with troops marching in formation and operating a wide variety of war machinery.”

Wood and CG supervisor Gary Brozenich (Troy) started with two weeks of motion capture shoot. Stuntmen were shot on a stage equipped with a 14-camera Vicon system. Reproductions of the various war machines, with real ropes and actual weight, were used to obtain realistic manning movements from the performers. The data was then archived in groups corresponding to each machine: there was the trebuchet group with its 20 different pre-animated operators, the siege tower group with its team of 50, etc. The other major aspect of the session was the motion capture of the archers formations. These soldiers follow a very precise strategy: walk forward behind a shield, rise, shoot, duck, walk forward, etc., a complex choreography that had to be precisely reproduced by the computers. Each action was sampled five times, by two different performers, in order to provide a sufficient variety of body language. No more than two stuntmen were motion captured at a time. For the all-important cavalry (an army division absent from Troy), 24 cameras were used to motion capture the movement of horses.