In 2005 Chris began work on "300", a ferocious retelling of the ancient Battle of Thermopylae in which King Leonidas and 300 Spartans fought to the death against Xerxes and his massive Persian army. Although the film is set in ancient Greece it was entirely shot using bluescreen in an old locomotive repair shop in Montreal, Canada. In post production the raw footage was transformed into a mythical vision of Greek legend. Virtually every frame of the film combines blue-screen live action with computer generated effects - over 1500 scenes with over 1300 visual effect shots.
Managing Visual
Effects with Panorama
The visual effects team
assembled for this mammoth project ultimately
consisted of ten vendors and over 250 artists,
compositors, editors, animators, technicians and
other specialists. According to Chris "A movie
this complex has literally tens of
thousands of visual effects details to
manage. For example we created
over 30,000 quicktime clips during the course of
the 300 production. Everything is on a
tight deadline, and
we can't afford to drop the ball on even a single
detail. To make that happen I have built
custom Panorama databases
to manage the visual effects and the digital
intermediates on dozens of feature films. On "300"
we used the multi-user Panorama Enterprise
Server for the first time, allowing
us to co-ordinate the work across the entire
team. Panorama's RAM based
speed made it easy to manage
our primary database with 19,750 records and 181
fields (each record managed 1, 2, or 3 QuickTime
movies), saving thousands of hours during the
post-production process. The complete custom
database application includes 5 databases with
over 5 million data cells, all in RAM. In
addition to co-ordinating between team members I
even programmed Panorama to generate scripts for
Apple's Shake, Final Cut Pro, and other packages
that enable these programs to communicate and
interact with closed systems such as Avid,
Inferno, Lightworks, and Quantel."
"Panorama sacrifices a little simplicity at the
start of the learning curve, but this
pays huge dividends
for those who spend a little time to learn
more. Panorama's programming language is
far deeper and more
flexible than FileMaker Pro's. I
can say without reservation that
the speed with which Panorama has
allowed me to create and implement applications has
been a major factor in the success I've had in my
profession."
