MPC modeled 30 buildings in CG to create the city of Troy.

The Mighty Fleet
With MPC deep immersed into epic battles and antique cities, the task of recreating the allied armada and its landing was assigned to Framestore CFC, London. The 130 shots were supervised by Jon Thum: “The pullback on the armada at sea was our most difficult shot. There are only two real ships in the shot, the rest is completely digital. We built them as modular creations, each model combining elements taken among five different hulls, five prows, and about one hundred sails. By combining these elements, we managed to create a whole armada in which every ship looked different. At the end of the shot, there are about 800 ships in the frame. If you count in the units that are out of frame, you get an armada of 1,000 ships.”

The most difficult aspect of the shot was not the creation of the fleet itself, but the tracking that allowed it to be anchored to the surface of the sea. “In order to track an element into a shot, you need to have stable reference points in the frame,” explains Thum. “However, when you’re out at sea, there are no such things as stable tracking marks. What we came up with was to shoot the plates with two dinghies pulling five buoys evenly spaced on a 80-yard rope alongside the hero ships. It gave us the reference we needed and allowed us to track the shot, at least most of it — at the end of the move, the camera was one mile away from the ships, which meant that we could no longer see our buoys. It took a lot of finessing to get the tracking right. In the end, this one shot was several months in the making…

Framestore CFC added 4,000 soldiers and hundreds of ships to this Greek armanda landing sequence.

The landing on the beach presented its own set of problems. Framestore CFC had to add 4,000 digital soldiers to the 400 extras that had been photographed, plus hundreds of ships at sea. The CG army was created via motion capture with actors performing a great variety of actions: carrying, digging, pulling, etc. The hero shot of the landing sequence is a helicopter flyover of the whole beach. “This shot was 30 seconds long and showed just everything. To make things more complicated, the operator had tilted up too early and as a result, there was no real extra on the beach at the beginning of the plate: they were all gathered at the other end. It meant we had to work with an empty beach for most of the shot… Without any reference in the plate, it made the whole process very difficult.”

To complete the work done at MPC and Framestore CFC, 165 shots were assigned to Cinesite Europe, London. Supervised by Sue Rowe, the effects included a rain of digital flaming arrows on the Greek soldiers, the duplication of fireball elements launched by the Trojan army and the addition of a CG blade on Pitt’s weapon in the beach battle.

What’s Next?
With their sweeping camera moves and intricate action, the Troy crowd scenes clearly mark another improvement in the field. In fact, one may wonder what the next step could be. The digital extras in Return of the King and Troy already are full frame, in bright sunlight, in shots lasting several seconds. Where do we go from there? We may very well have to wait for the release of Star Wars: Episode III to get an answer to that question…

Alain Bielik is the founder and special effects editor of renowned effects magazine S.F.X, published in France since 1991. He also contributes to various French publications and occasionally to Cinefex.