Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1531774
approach did save us a lot of time and we finished in Morocco a week ahead of schedule. Another of the Moroccan locations was an Egyptian village, seen in flashback, where the young Lucius was being hidden from the Roman Praetorians sent by the Emperors to murder him. The production used a partially abandoned town with fantastic views of the desert, some large traditional Berber mudbrick "Casbah-style" buildings which we dressed, and brought it all back to life. As luck would have it, one of the few buildings that was still intact was occupied by a local woman who had turned it into a kind of traditional museum for the rare tourists who stumbled upon the place and so needed very little work to transform it into our main interior set. With the addition of some domestic animals; camels, chickens, donkeys and scrawny dogs, set decoration added a pair of enormous mud- caked dovecotes and a practical open-air bread oven—the transformation was complete. Another large set was the provincial gladiatorial arena where our defeated Numidian characters who had been captured by the Romans were sent to amuse the crowd. The film used the citadel of Ait Ben Haddou, where we had staged a similar scene in the first film, only this time we were supposed to be on the outskirts of Rome. Ridley requested that we try to match the general look of the arena close to the one in the first film and use the same- colored flags and banners so that he could re- cycle some of the crowd reaction footage from the original film to save time on location. Additional cypress and olive trees were brought in by head greensman Roger Holden to green up the barren desert landscape which were sampled and tiled by the VFX department to create the impression of an Italian landscape on the outskirts of the Roman capital. A digital Colosseum was added to C. PROVINCIAL ARENA.. DIGITAL MODEL. D. PROVINCIAL ARENA. SET PHOTO. E. EXTERIOR OF THRAEX'S VILLA. CONCEPT ILLUSTRATION BY KIM FREDRICKSEN. E C D