It may be surprising to note that the entire film was shot in 60 days, with practically ninety percent of the scenes, indoors, in an abandoned Montreal warehouse. The Persian messenger‘s ride over the hill to Sparta was the only scene to be shot outdoors. Grain and lens flares were added for the rough, organic feeling.

Chris Watts, the Visual Effects Supervisor, faced the challenge of creating a three-dimensional version of Miller’s world and adding elements that weren’t in his novel.

A Quebec based firm, Hybride Technologies, was the chief contributer behind the film’s mindblowing visual effects and realism.

The film was edited on an Avid, with a HD cut also maintained in Final Cut Pro. The 3D was made using Maya, XSI and Lightwave while the color management was handled by Truelight software. Most of the film was shot at high speed, between 50 and 150 fps [Frames Per Second] and later slowed down. A normal film is shot at 24 fps.

There were over a 1006 visual effects scenes in the movie. “I had 16 terabytes on my desktop for the movie. We were an all-Mac department and I had 15 G5s. Most of the compositing was done on Shake or Inferno,” says Watts.

The crew shot a little bit of ocean off the Santa Monica Pier and that was used for a couple of shots but most of it was digital water. Ten visual effects firms from three continents have contributed to the film. A German company, Scanline, digitally created all the elements of a scene showing Persian boats crashing against rocks.

For another scene, depicting a burning village, a burning building was shot from a lot of angles and smoke and put together in an amazing sequence.

The flowing effect of the Oracle dancing scene was accomplished by filming the actress under water.

Scenes involving horses were particularly complicated.

“In the first battle scene,” Watts relates, “we had the riders ride the horses up to the edge of the blue screen and skid to a stop. That was a challenge we got around through clever editing and a convincing backdrop.”

Grant Freckleton, the Visual Effects art director, designed, what was called, 2-D blood used in the film. He splattered coffee onto napkins, had it photographed and did some digital processes on it.

The 2-D blood looked a lot more like the comic book and the the makers could use a lot more of it without agitating the ratings board. The film ultimately got a R certificate from the MPAA [Motion Pictures Association of America ] as opposed to the NC17 they might have got, if they would have used fake blood.

Blue screen, rather than green, was chosen for several reasons.

“We have a lot of red in the movie, and sometimes when you have saturated red on a green screen you often have edge problems, where you get a yellow edge. It has to do with the way light travels through film and interacts with the emulsion layers,” explains Watts.

Whatever the background color, it took some getting used to for the actors who had nothing around them except green and blue walls.
In 2004, Watts won a Visual Effects Society Award for his work on the music video for Britney Spears' hit song Toxic.

He was also nominated in 2001 for an MTV Music Video Award for U2's Elevation.

Film for next Issue - Sin City

Professor Lee Wee Sun

Professor Lee Wee Sun from the School of Computing did his PhD from the Australian National University in the theory of machine learning. Theory of Machine learning deals with finding out the amount of computation and information needed for learning.

Over the years Professor Lee Wee Sun has widened his area of research. Now, he does research not only in the field of machine learning but also in the field of planning under uncertainty. These two fields could be broadly

classified as subareas of Artificial intelligence. Professor Lee Wee Sun also mentors students who are interested in research in Artificial Intelligence.

Some of the courses suggested by Professor Lee Wee Sun for students interested in Artificial Intelligence are Foundation of Artificial Intelligence (CS3234), Machine Learning and Neural Networks (CS3244), Knowledge-Based Systems (CS4244) and Uncertainty Modelling in AI (CS5340). Artificial intelligence can be further applied in the field of Robotics and even Data Mining where clever algorithms are needed for useful management

Research has shown that Safari, a web browser developed by Apple, could be used to run unauthorized software on a Windows machine. The browser affects the MAC OS as well but the attack on a MAC machine would be less severe than on a Windows Machine.

In a matter of a few weeks Microsoft is going to stop the distribution of Windows XP and promote only Windows Vista. Microsoft believes that Vista is not as bad as its user claim it to be.

IBM Research's Frances E. Allen was honored as the first female recipient of the A.M. Turing Award for contributions that led to fundamental improvements in the performance of problem-solving computer programs and the acceleration of high performance computing utilization.

Randy Wang and the Digital Study Hall (DSH) team have won ACM's Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics. The team has developed a user-generated video-sharing system that local teachers in South Asia use to improve learning in their classrooms.

Researchers at the University of Southern California are attempting to dissect human movement and speech in order to produce software that can generate virtual humans. Such a breakthrough would be especially attractive to Hollywood, allowing filmmakers to create realistic artificial characters whose physical and personality traits can be patched together from existing actors.

The chief cyber security officer, Mark Graff, of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has predicted that a lack of incentive for software companies to design secure products would lead to software prone to bugs and also the Internet will suffer worse virus and worm attacks in the near future.

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