Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1532695
VISUAL EFFECTS Gladiator II's visual effects were achieved through a combination of practical elements, captured in-camera, and digital effects created in post production. Neil Corbould served as the film's special effects supervisor, determining which effects would be captured practical- ly and enhanced later during the post process. Corbould operates Neil Corbould Special Effects Ltd., a leading special effects compa- ny with a head office at Pinewood Studios, and further workshops and a base at Longcross Studios. His work with director Ridley Scott spans decades, including work on the original Gladiator film back in 2000. Industrial Light & Magic's Mark Bakowski served as visual effects supervisor on the film, tasked with figuring out which studios—in- cluding ILM and Framestore—would handle the different visuals that would be added in post. "I'm employed by ILM, so for the show, I was contracted out of Paramount," relates Bakowski. While it may, in the- ory, benefit to keep all the visual effects under one roof, he notes that there are additional factors that weigh on a supervisor's decision to broaden its list of contributors. "There is, to my mind, a certain logic of giving it all to one compa- ny, because you're dealing with one broker the whole time, who are probably [in] one time zone. So that's attractive," he explains. "The downsides are that some facilities are more expensive than others, and some work is easy to do, so it's quite good to have a couple of cheaper vendors to do easy work, like a wire removal or a quick fix for a bit of paint work here and there. Now, if you pay for a big company to do that, you're paying for all the overhead…It's a big, old machine… It's not cost efficient to do really easy work when you're big, so you have some cheaper ones…And then also it's nice to have an over- flow as well. At a certain point, a facility may get too busy. That's why Framestore and ILM are quite good to go together. They're both very capable," he notes of the film's high-end needs. Gladiator II has a number of what the effects pros consider "big ticket" items in terms of visual effects. The baboons and rhino com- petitions in the coliseum were some of the sequences that were challenging, as was the sequence in which the arena is filled with shark-infested water, in which the gladiators battle from smaller ships. And of course, there's the Numidia sea battle. Corbould thinks back to his initial conversation with director Ridley Scott about the film's effects needs. "Ridley really likes a practical element in there, one way or another, just to get as a grounding," Corbould explains. "The first conversation I had with him was about Numidia—the sea battle. He wanted these 120-foot-long boats that weighed 80 tons to travel in an environ- ment that was a desert." Production designer Arthur Max created the look of the ships, and Corbould's team at BGI then built the set pieces. "It was Arthur Max's designs, and then we sort of brought them to reality," he re- veals, crediting Stuart Heath and the BGI team. "We worked very closely with Arthur in the design—what was practical, what wasn't practical. Arthur's great to work with. He understands what we need to do." To give the boats movement, in the desert landscape, Corbould brought in enormous hydraulic machines that were capable of hold- ing a ship and moving it in the way the director desired. The "building ILM's Mark Bakowsksi supervised the film's visual effects. i