VFX Pro
Chris Watts has never worked with a wolf before. He and his crew were the designated animal wranglers for a scene in the movie 300, directed by Zack Snyder. The wolf in question is making an appearance in the epic about Spartan warriors at the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. Watts and company are trying not only to make the creature stalk through the scene convincingly, but also to capture a particularly menacing shine on its teeth. "If you dipped a popsicle stick in maple syrup, that's the look we want for this fang," Watts says to one of his team.
Fortunately, no one has to lubricate a real-life lupine grin to get the shot Watts wants. In 300, the wolf's cuspids are a purely digital construct, as is every hair on its hide, the rocky canyon the wolf is haunting, the wintry nighttime sky overhead, and virtually every other element of the shot save for the young actor playing the animal's Spartan prey. More than a year after the human element of the scene was shot on a blue screen stage with a stand-in mechanical wolf, Watts, the movie's visual-effects supervisor, is filling in the expansive blanks with staffers at Hybride, a Quebec-based effects facility. "One nice thing about doing this on the computer," Watts says, "is that if you decide, ‘Okay, I like the hair and the eyes and everything else,' you can turn off all the other layers, and just highlight the teeth."
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