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 practically and enhanced later during the post process. Corbould operates Neil Corbould Special Effects Ltd., a leading special effects company 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 – including 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 theory, 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 company, 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 overflow 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 competitions 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 environment 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 reveals, 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's 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 holding a ship and moving it in the way the director desired. The “building movers” are all-wheel-drive, remote-controlled industrial platforms that are designed for moving extremely-large and sensitive objects.
“I've always wanted to use them,” notes Corbould. “And that was the sort of thing that sprung to my mind when Ridley was talking about this sequence, and it worked really well! In the old days, how we normally do is put it on railway tracks, but you've only got one plane. You can just go in and out. Whereas these, they were multi-axle and they could steer 365 degrees. They're very versatile for Ridley to get his shots and his camera angles. And, with all the cameras that he uses, it gave him a good a tool to position the boats how he wanted them.”
“With the boats…virtually everything starts with practical photography,” adds Bakowski. “You've got something there together, the light looks like this and the camera moves like this. And then Ridley might go, ‘I don't like the way the camera is moving. It's too far away. The ship is too far away. But I like everything else about it.’ So at that point we go, ‘Okay. We're going to reference but then replace everything and change the camera, but we know what he liked. We know that this and this, but not the camera.’ So there was a certain number of fully-digital shots in there...It's always based on the practical to start with, which is great.”
The rhino sequence is also based on practical elements shot during production.
“We virtually always kept the rider,” states Bakowski. “There's one or two, or maybe three CG riders in there, but in general, we pretty much always kept the rider and his saddle that he's on.”
The baboon fight made use of digital creatures that began as a basic rig.
“Then, (you) adjust say the arm lengths - it's got longer arms,” Bakowski notes of the baboons. “Proportions are different there. But the actual point of having an elbow joint, a wrist joint, finger joints, etc., that's pretty standard because…it comes to the default in software. It's just the nuance, which makes it specific to that creature.”
ILM handled roughly 650 digital visual effects, working specifically on shots of Rome, the coliseum, the opening battle and the final battle. Framestore handled approximately 200 shots, including the baboons and the rhino sequence.
“Framestore's got a strong tradition of characters,” Bakowski notes. “And then due to the weirdness of tax breaks and finances, we had to spend some more money with them, basically, so they ended up picking up the underworld sequence as well.”
The remaining 300 to 400 effects were spread out amongst several smaller facilities.
Looking at the completed feature, both Bakowski and Corbould point to their respective highlights.
“For me, it would probably be the opening battle, I think,” says Bakowski. “It also brings in Neil's world very much as well. There's so much work in there. It’s obvious the work that’s not hidden, but then there's a lot of work that's hidden as well. There's the obvious things, like the water, the fireballs and the arrows, the boats, etc., but you would not believe the amount of other work that's in there as well…And the sequence works beautifully.”
Corbould agrees, adding that the naval battles are also highlights, noting how Scott got so much done in such a short amount of time.
“The opening battle was shot in like ten days or something,” he recalls. “I think we were in Morocco for ten days for shooting and we were supposed to be there for three weeks. So Ridley just smashed it — completely smashed it!”