The Emperor and the Assassin, directed by Kaige Chan was the Technical Grand Prize winner of Cannes Film Festival 1999. CENTRO Digital Pictures Ltd. took care of all digital visual effects of this movie and I was the VFX supervisor.
The most challenging shots of this project were the ones showing off massive armies while the production budget was quite limited. We worked with the deputy director to design a 2D time-shift replication approach that worked very well. The technique was later showcased in Issac V. Kerlow’s ‘The Art of 3D Computer Animation adn Effects’ book (see below).
We developed a custom difference keyer to assist the matte extraction and then the marching soldiers layer matte were carefully polished by our Domino artists. By applying time-shift to multiple duplicated layers of the marching soldiers, we were able to create an illusion that thousands of soldiers were marching (see below, courtesy of CENTRO Digital Pictures Ltd.). We were very lucky with this shot as the shooting went really well and the lighting condition were pretty consistent.
