Troy how many extras

But after Petersen met with Benioff, who had only one other film under his belt at the time—the Spike Lee -directed 25th Hour —the two clicked. Petersen was forced to choose between Batman v Superman and Troy, a film that was itself being dangled to Christopher Nolan —who had already made well-received films like Insomnia and Memento, but had not yet become a household name.

Though, to be fair, Memento did make Nolan a breakout star. So Petersen went for Troy, while Warner Bros. Pitt had expressed interest in playing Achilles, the golden warrior who leads the fight against Troy, and was meeting with Petersen at a German restaurant about the part—but at the time, he had a long beard and long, dark hair, and had lost weight in preparation for another movie that never came to fruition.

But Pitt understood his worries. Over several beers, he promised Petersen that he would look like the Hollywood version of Achilles once more read: buff and blond by the time the film was ready to shoot. And he kept that promise, shearing off the beard and working out religiously over the next six months to get into Greek-god shape. The trickiest bit of casting was Helen, the storied beauty who sparks the Trojan War. At the time, the studio was very interested in Nicole Kidman.

Petersen auditioned thousands of hopefuls before finding then-unknown German actor Diane Kruger, who auditioned in London. The cast was assembled and sent to shoot in Malta. The location was beautiful, and came with a much-needed tax break—but was also swelteringly hot. However, legend has it that the entire area northwest of Turkey once belonged to the Kingdom of Greece.

There is archeological research to show that the city of Troy had been inhabited starting around B. C for almost 4, years.

Because Achilles was a half-god, he was very strong and soon became a great warrior. However, Brad Pitt still surfaced an injury while shooting a scene for Troy. The incident led to a delay in filming for several weeks but the actor recovered soon to resume production. Brad Pitt and Eric Bana did not use stunt doubles for their epic duel. Most historians now agree that ancient Troy was to be found at Hisarlik.

Troy was real. According to their lineage, Achilles and Patroclus were related to each other through a nymph called Aegina. After being raped by Zeus, Aegina gave birth to Aeacus, whose son, Peleus, was the father of Achilles. Based on this, Achilles and Patroclus were first-cousins once removed. But, at a run-time of nearly three hours, Troy is the most thorough screen adaptation of the story of the Trojan War. In legend, Troy is a city that was besieged for 10 years and eventually conquered by a Greek army led by King Agamemnon.

The ancient city of Troy was located along the northwest coast of Asia Minor, in what is now Turkey. When Achilles was fighting under Agamemnon, slaves were taken in the Trojan territory as the Greeks moved across the land, sacking and looting along the way. Why did Achilles refuse to fight? He was angry because Agamemnon took his war-prize from him, his slave-bride Briseis.

With this approach, we ended up with shots featuring , soldiers! The A. Individual fights were handled separately, with stuntmen performing complicated routines on a MoCap stage. The resulting animation was composited in the foreground of the battle scenes by digital effects supervisor Rudi Holzapfels team. As often is the case, CG soldiers ended up much closer to camera that what had originally been planned. The CG extras had been developped for long shots, but eventually, we had to use them in closeups too adds Jarrett.

There are some shots in which CG soldiers are composited right next to the principal actors. As if the massive shots on the battling armies were not enough, MPC also created many effects involving the main characters in action.

Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom and company didnt exactly shout it out in the media, but many of their action shots were filmed without an actual weapon in sight To start with, Bloom never fired one single arrow on the set, although his character Paris is a gifted archer in the film.

He made the move of firing, empty-handed, and we added the arrows in CG, reveals Jarrett. The same was done on the swords. It was too dangerous for the principals to swing their weapon on the set.

So, they only had the handle and the blade was added in CG. In some shots, we also had to replace their hand, or even the whole arm, with a digital replica in order to animate a more natural move its difficult to simulate the action of hitting something when you actually dont hit anything. Besides the battle scenes, MPC also tackled the creation of the city itself. For a while, Jarrett considered using a large miniature but eventually opted for a complete CG approach after watching a test in which a virtual building proved to be as realistic as its model counterpart.

Another layer of variety was added with color patterns and some 25GB of textures. With MPC deep immersed into epic battles and antique cities, the task of recreating the allied armada and its landing was assigned to Framestore CFC, London.

The shots were supervised by Jon Thum: The pullback on the armada at sea was our most difficult shot. There are only two real ships in the shot, the rest is completely digital. We built them as modular creations, each model combining elements taken among five different hulls, five prows, and about one hundred sails.

By combining these elements, we managed to create a whole armada in which every ship looked different. At the end of the shot, there are about ships in the frame. If you count in the units that are out of frame, you get an armada of 1, ships. The most difficult aspect of the shot was not the creation of the fleet itself, but the tracking that allowed it to be anchored to the surface of the sea. In order to track an element into a shot, you need to have stable reference points in the frame, explains Thum.

However, when youre out at sea, there are no such things as stable tracking marks. What we came up with was to shoot the plates with two dinghies pulling five buoys evenly spaced on a yard rope alongside the hero ships. It gave us the reference we needed and allowed us to track the shot, at least most of it at the end of the move, the camera was one mile away from the ships, which meant that we could no longer see our buoys.

It took a lot of finessing to get the tracking right. In the end, this one shot was several months in the making. The landing on the beach presented its own set of problems. Framestore CFC had to add 4, digital soldiers to the extras that had been photographed, plus hundreds of ships at sea. The CG army was created via motion capture with actors performing a great variety of actions: carrying, digging, pulling, etc.