Unfortunately the board would not let me search for “300” to see if this has come up before.
They were air-brushed enhanced on the actors bodies.
Thank you . . . do you have a cite for that? Or can you explain how you came to that conclusion?
TIA.
Lot’s of publicity about it at the time. It’s standard makeup stuff, they darken the valleys between muscles to make the parts bulging out look bigger. It’s done to enhance women’s cleavage also.
I heard the actors were doing a big workout program during the filming, so it wasn’t all makeup.
As for digital enhancement, I don’t know if they did, but they may have.
No specific cite, but it’s a common technique to use makeup to enhance musculature and body curves. Almost any time a woman on screen has exceptional cleavage, especially in an evening gown, it’s likely deepened and shaped with makeup. Sometimes you can see the makeup when the lighting changes the wrong way. I’d be very unsurprised to find that 300 used a similar technique, either in makeup or post-CGI, to enhance muscle definition. It was SO extreme in many shots.
Ninja’d on cleavage. Good one to be ninja’ed on.
That’s going to be my rock band’s name. I called it first.
I remember reading an interview with Gerard Butler where he stated that the hardest part about prepping for that movie wasn’t the workouts to build muscle, but the the starvation diet necessary to cut his body fat enough to give definition. I couldn’t find that one, but this article says he trained for six hours a day for four months.
Thank your the responses so far. I have no doubt that the actors who played Spartan warriors in 300 had to get buff for the part, or that makeup was used.
I am curious though whether there was also enhancement after the filing. Is there any way to tell by looking at the images?
That type of film editing would be incredibly expensive. I’ve only heard of post production film changes being done for a few seconds of footage.
One famous example was a Star Trek film where Shatner thought his butt looked big in a scene. They altered the footage post production. But that was like a 10 second scene.
It would be a huge job to add muscle definition post production for a long piece of film.
I’ve used a Adobe product called After Effects to alter video. It’s very, very, very tedious and time consuming. In my project I was adding a graphic that I created in photoshop. The graphic was added to some video scenes that I shot. I got good results but it took a lot of time. The learning curve on After Effects is pretty steep. I just barely scratched the surface on the learning curve.
300 was a phenomenally expensive movie, and I’d bet a very large amount of the cost was in post. Some films *are *“finished” one frame at a time in tools like AE.
ETA: Wait, it was only $65M in 2006. I can’t believe that. But still - given how simple the sets and settings were, that money had to go somewhere, and I’d bet a very large percentage went into post-processing.
It was all shot on blue screens and put together in post-production, so that effort was huge. Would they enhance muscles by hand editing of the shape? Maybe for a short shot. They’d more likely use post-production coloring techniques to do it without changing the shape.
There is a technology called “Lola” that is used to digitally alter actor’s faces. It was first used publicly for X-Men: The Last Stand to take decades off the faces of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. Previously, the technology had been used for “Music Video Divas” (aka Madonna).
In theory, this could be used to change Butler’s skin to more buff skin. But seriously, the man worked out four fricken months, SIX HOURS A DAY! Give him his well-deserved props.
Not so much according to this, Just insane levels of working out.
You can’t do it unless you’re already in great shape. The number of heavily built men who can do 25 pullups at all, let alone at the conclusion of a tough workout that began with another 25 pullups, is very, very small.
I read those accounts too, but it occurred to me that of course the people involved with the movie would emphasize the physical training of the actors regardless of whether digital enhancement were added on top.
The question is not whether they used digital enhancement to make a fat slob look like a buff warrior. The question is whether they used digital enhancement to make buff warriors look even more buff.
Here’s a snippet from the movie I found on Youtube:
If you skip to 1:09 and look at the shadows in the warrior’s as he breathes, it looks a bit fake to me. As he breathes in, prominent shadows appear in his abs and as he continues to breath in, the shadows mostly go away. I’m not an expert on lighting, anatomy, or any of this stuff but it just looks sketchy to me.
A few seconds later, you see the warrior breathing again and the shadows look a bit more realistic but still kinda sketchy.
Also, if you check out this snippet: - YouTube
and freeze it at 0:00, the warrior’s torso seems a bit fake to me.
Here’s what’s apparently a “making of” snippet:
So for example at 0:10 you can see a big group of actors who play Spartan warriors charging forward. To be sure, they all look very buff. But they look a bit more buff in the actual movie.
Here’s another “making of” snippet:
Again, the men look very buff.
So my tentative conclusion is that the muscles in the movie are pretty much real, but a little digital color was added to enhance them.
Just had to note, Sarah Silverman hosted the MTV Movie Awards and said that the film’s title was the answer to the question, “How gay is this movie on a scale from one to ten?”
I was going to throw this in earlier but thought it might be pointless hijackery.
It’s not. It’s the funniest goddamned movie joke I’ve ever heard.
That was not the actual workout routine.