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This article was taken from Total Film, Issue 42, July 2000. Click on the pictures to see the big versions.
 Let The Games Begin
by Stewart Jamieson
It took time, effort and some darn big computers to bring the world of Gladiator to life. But hey, Rome wasn't built in a day...
Compared to bringing an ancient city convincingly to life, the brashness of The Matrix's effects look like a doddle. Resurrecting an entire civilisation without making it resemble a computer composite was the problem UK FX house Mill Film had to wrestle with on Gladiator. "Ridley Scott said that if this was a sci-fi feature, then the Colosseum would be the mothership," says its visual effects producer Nikki Penny. "It made us realise that the Colosseum had to be fucking awesome."
 Which is an understatement. The Colosseum is so seamlessly restored in Gladiator that you begin to question the authenticity of the crumbling shell out in Rome. Mill Film collaborated with a barrage of talent to produce architectural visual FX on a scale never seen before. Effects supervisor Rob Harvey explains: "The art department built a 50-foot section of the Colosseum, which was used for close-ups, so we had to digitally create the entire exterior of the Colosseum as well as the interior. Our 3D model was built to the exact scale measurements of the original.
 Penny adds: "Ridley said: 'When Maximus and the audience enter for the first time, the camera goes right around him and we see up into the gods and the cheering crowds.' He wanted a hand-held, I'm-in-there-with-you feeling, even though the only thing that's real is the gate the gladiators go through and the bottom part of the set."
According to Harvey, Scott said to him: "You're going to be really depressed at the end of this because everyone will be asking: 'What did you do on it?'" But, adds Harvey, "that's the greatest compliment we could ever ask for."
Feline Groovy
Harvey: "For the scene where Maximus (Russell Crowe) battles tigers, we shot live animals on a blue screen, swiping in the air and growling. We then shot Crowe fighting and composited the two images together. Steven Spielberg watched the first cut with Ridley, who phoned us up after and said: 'Well, he sat through the whole film and said: "That tiger scene must have been tricky to do".' He didn't realise that it was an effects shot."
View From The Gods
Harvey: "We called this the Blimp Shot. It's a bird's-eye view flying down the street, with people walking towards the Colosseum and finishing looking down inside the arena. Unfortunately the set was only ever partially built, so we had to put tracking markes all over the place giving us cues for the houses and buildings surrounding the Colosseum - or we'd have had the people hitting walls. We then built the shot inside the computer, completing all of the buildings in 3D and adding thousands of digital people."
Hitting The Boards
 Storyboards are the seeds from which great movie scenes grow. Even if they don't make the final cut...
Artist Sylvain Despretz spent eight months working on concept design and storyboards for Gladiator. The huge budget (around $120 million) and long run-in time allowed a great deal of experimentation, which explains why more than 50 percent of the his storyboards were for sequences not in the finished film. "A film's job is not to be faithful to the storyboard, but the other way round. My job is to listen to the director and then interpret their vision as closely as I can."
 Many of the unused sequences revolved around fights in the arena. "When Maximus is training," says Despretz, "the film takes you through two or three fights in that point of his life. The first idea that Ridley came up with was a rhino fight because he felt the film needed a tremendous battle involving exotic animals. We storyboarded it out, but it died - with all the CG work and prosthetics it was budgeted at around $3 million.
 "Another scene had Maximus walk in to the arena, and the walls appear to move. You discover that it's albino Africans armed with bows and arrows and painted with chalk to blend into the walls. They're blind, and every time they hear a sound, they try to hit it with an arrow, so Maximus tricks them into firing at each other. We were trying to come up with visceral scenes that would be unforgettable and that one was. It was cut, but hey, you never know - it might reappear in another Ridley movie."
Check out Sylvain Despretz's website at www.hollywoodcomics.com/despretz.html for storyboards on everything from Superman Reborn to I Am Legend.
Reed Between The Lines
The most publicised incident on the Gladiator shoot was Oliver Reed's death a week before the legendary party animal was due to wrap his role as Proximo, the impresario who trains Maximus as a gladiator. His death prompted rumours that the Colosseum wasn't the only imposing structure the film had to computer-generate...
"Totally false," says Penny. "What we did was very similar to the process used on The Crow after Brandon Lee died. We did not recreate a CG Oliver Reed and get him to walk. We just took him from one scene and placed him into another. The sequence we fabricated is when Proximo walks towards Maximus' slave-school cell to free him after a sudden attack of morality. We used an earlier take of Ollie, in another scene, rotoscoped him out and positioned him into the new plate. We lit it very sympathetically, giving him a haircut and a digital shave, because he had a full beard in the take we used. We turned his beard into a goatee, and replaced the skin by blending an extra's face into his jawline."
 Tree-Dimensional Images
Penny: "This is the opening scene in the film, the battle in Germania between the Romans and the Goths. The visual effects applied to this shot are crowd replication, multiplying the Roman army by about four, fireball explosions that are also replicated as well as being CG enhanced in direction and lenght. But of course there are also elements that the audience will think have been doctored, but aren't - one morning it just started to snow for a day-and-a-half. Ridley let the cameras roll and it became so magical."
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