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n n n n Visual Effects costumes as well, to give them magical glows.” Te effects artists swirled the clouds with fluid solvers and created the shapes using Render- Man shaders. Compositors placed the gods in the mist using Te Foundry’s Nuke. Of all the work, Webber is especially pleased with how the crew treated Medusa. “She was a completely CG character,” he says, “a fascinating mythical character with human expressions. Not many films have done photo- real human faces in close-ups, and I think she looks incredibly real even though obviously she’s not. We’re proud of that.” Cinesite: Scorpiochs Te giant CG scorpions come in 15-, 30-, 40-, and 65-foot sizes and battle the warriors for close to six minutes. When tamed, they become methods of transport across the des- ert, following one another nose-to-tail like elephants, with as many as six people at a time riding atop in a palanquin. For reference, the Cinesite crew filmed four different scorpion species at a scorpion farm and brought two large creatures back to the studio for closer study. “Te bigger they are, the less venomous,” Stanley-Clamp says. “We watched how they jumped, how fast they could run, how far they could reach. We got them to run around and follow things. We also saw reference online of amazing fights be- tween scorpions and rats.” Modelers created the cinematic versions in Autodesk’s Mudbox, and riggers worked in Maya. “Te scorpions have eight legs, so they aren’t the typical quadruped, but we’ve done spiders before,” Stanley-Clamp says. “Te main consideration was the palanquin.” Te riggers constrained the creature’s tail so it couldn’t push through the palanquin, and attached reins from the riders inside to the Scorpioch’s mouth and claws. Leterrier planned to film the battle between the giant stinging creatures and the soldiers in three areas of Teide National Park (Tenerife, the Canary Islands), so set builders arrived a month early to add broken architecture to the natural environment. Tat gave Stanley- Clamp and a crew the opportunity to survey the set before the shoot. “We went out a week before filming and did a survey and reference photos,” he says. “We had measurements and a Lidar scan taken the weekend before film- ing, and we did rudimentary photogramme- try. I also did HDRI photography every hour on the hour for that week.” In addition, Stanley-Clamp took shot-specif- ic HDRI photographs during filming, but be- cause the action took place in daylight and the 24 April 2010 sky was rarely cloudy, the early work paid off. As the crew filmed the action, Sam Worthington (Perseus) fought, in close-con- tact scenes, with a green-suited stuntman on a pogo stick holding a big block. Using in-house software, Cinesite gave the director a real-time overlay of the CG scorpion onto the live-ac- tion footage during principal photography. For the travel montage, Cinesite inserted the palanquin-carrying scorpions into foot- age shot in the Canary Islands, Ethiopia, and to his ability to go on location early. “We had three months,” he says. “We had to hit the ground running, and everything went to the wire. So we definitely reaped the benefits of getting out to location early—almost to the point where we’d pay to go out there ourselves. Te crew doesn’t like visual effects on set be- cause we slow them down. Tey don’t want to get out of the way so you can do a survey. So the time invested upfront pays for itself in the long run.” (At top) Aaron Sims, character designer for the film, developed the Harpies’ design; animators at The Moving Picture Company gave the winged creatures their personalities. (Bottom) For Pegasus, MPC artists put CG wings on a real horse and created a digital double. Wales, adding digital doubles for wide shots and to send people flying through the air if flung off the tail of a scorpion. As the giant beasts trod along, Cinesite kicked up dust and dirt using Houdini. “We rendered the dust as conventional passes and moved it into Shake with as much depth cuing as we could get,” Stanley-Clamp says. Although the studio’s core compositing tool is Apple’s Shake, compositors also used Nuke on some difficult and dynamic shots. For tracking, they used pri- marily Science D Vision’s 3D-Equalizer. Stanley-Clamp credits the crew’s ability to push through their shots so quickly in part MPC: Pegasus, Kraken, Argos Although VFX supervisor Gary Brozenich began working on the film 14 months before release, from the time principal photography ended and production started, the crew had five months to deliver their 220 shots. “We did a number of different things through the film—CG water and ocean, everything that was Pegasus-related, the CG Argos environ- ment, the kraken, and the Harpies, so the end sequence was our main work.” For Pegasus, Te Moving Picture Com- pany added CG wings to footage of a horse shot on location. “Whenever he’s running on