Grant Freckelton designed and art directed the visual effects for the film 300
“One of the first things you want to do when adapting a graphic novel is read the graphic novel,” he says. “As soon as I opened the pages, it became obvious that we were going to do this film as something stylized, not as a literal adaptation of the Battle of Thermopylae.”
To create the stills, he rented Spartan outfits from a costume shop, convinced some beefy Animal Logic employees to dress in the costumes, and photographed them on the beach in various poses. Then, working with the photos into Photoshop, he created an army of 100 Spartans using a visual treatment that respected Miller and Varley’s style.
“It was more about achieving color and texture through color treatment,” Freckelton says. “In the novel, everything is in a sepia tone with browns and warm colors and with reds striking against that brown. It’s almost monochromatic. The first concept art I did used that color palette.”
In early 2005, Snyder shot the test, a 90-second battle sequence, on a bluescreen sound stage in Los Angeles and Freckelton spent two months working on digital backgrounds. Then, he returned to Australia. And waited.
“Six months later, I was shipped to LA,” he says. “They told me I’d be in LA for like two or three weeks and then they’d shoot the film in Sydney. But the day I arrived, they told me they were shooting in Montreal.” He spent about a month in Los Angeles, and then flew home to Sydney.
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