Visions of Visual Style

In the pictures below is shown sketches of the visual style to the project TT300. As it is noticeable, the style is pretty more advanced to the previous visual style, which can be seen in the Tribute to 300 teaser. New camera is a big difference ofcourse, when it gives more spirit to the picture overall in terms of depth of field, color vibrance, sharpness, everything. And then learning on the color grading techniques have brought a bit more that 300-feeling to these shots.

Of course complete replication of the 300 visual style is not possible, since there are few restrictions: the movie was filmed with a very advanced movie-camera featuring 12.5 megapixel sensor and 150 fps-shooting. And they shot the movie entirely on green screen, so the surroundings have been made digitally, which gives the possibility to make them look more painted than real environments. But if these things are not noted, then I think it is possible to make somewhat equivalent style to our film. From what we have started, and looking the visual style now, there are many improvements. For example, I have learned to isolate the red of the Spartan cape and crush the blacks of it, and realy make out the red stand out more, as the rest of the image is somewhat desaturated. And with advanced tools, I can separate areas which I want to bring out more, in this case helmet, shield and vambraces (that they wouldn't look like plastic), and increase their highlight, which increases contrast and is one basis to achieving that cartoon-like look. Hours and hours of learning are starting to pay off, slowly but steadily. I maybe construct somekind of VFX breakdown on some of the shots for you all to see what is happening in the editing table. But for now, feast your eyes on these shots:

Two EOS 550D's

After some quite hard times of just simply bad luck and army, the new memory card arrived and quality proved to be something we had expected, and most important, the camera was fine. We have shot some test materials and even edited some for our upcoming trailer, which is planned to be released during the next fall/winter. And our director bought Canon EOS 550D also, so now we have two of them. Expands possibilities widely.

The main use for this project of two 550D's is the sequence, which has been inspired by the Leonidas' freestyle tracking-shot in the movie 300. In that shot, along with the quality speed-ramping is also an effect I like to call "zoom-ramping", when camera zooms back and forth quickly, even when the footage is slowed down. This has been achieved by bolting three cameras on the rig side-by-side, and everyone of them has been set to shoot at differenct focal lengths. In the editing table these three views have been combined to create dynamic and action-packed effect to the sequence. We have only two cameras for the use, but the third camera can be "emulated" by shooting some of the shots after the main shots, and then combining them. Plan is that we could do somekind of test shot in this year before good weather is gone, but that remains to be seen.