Unfortunately this breakdown video is all if have of Ben Hur, but I will be making a new video soon that will be ripped from a BluRay disc to show this in higher resolution, so hang on for this :) Ben Hur was a massive project where we were initially only to complete 240 shots for the climactic chariot race sequence. We ended up doing a few additional sequences with a small amount of work, but as the edit for the film was never locked during the 18 months of post production and went through over 140 iterations, our shot count exceeded 800 in total just for the chariot race sequence. If all the omit shots were in the edit, the final race would have extended from roughly ten minutes to around 30 minutes; which IMHO would have been somewhat more exciting as the sheer volume of action shots removed took away from the visceral intensity of the sequence. I believe that the goal was to keep the race under ten minutes however, which may explain the situation. The final sequence ended up having somewhere between 240-250 shots, I do not recall precisely today, but we did have well over 500 additional shots - which were also done, completed, approved, or in numerous different stages and iterations which included: all-CGI versions of shots, alternate plates/takes of shots, or entirely unique shots that simply were edited out of the final sequence. My comp team was already exhausted from just finishing another large project. Because Ben Hur was my first show as a compositing supervisor I was determined to ensure that nobody had their morale fall apart, and that only the very best work would be achieved. Because the edit was changing an average of 4-5 times daily, the shot assignments had to change constantly. This was a very troubling thing for me, because as someone having worked as a compositor for 15 years prior to becoming comp supe, I knew that this sort of thing was the cause of artists' being unhappy in the workplace and it became my goal to reign that in as much as possible. Sadly, as some artists found their workloads suddenly double, triple or completely vanish due to the ever changing edit with shots constantly omit/re-instated or changed into different shots etc, the need to reassign was a daunting and endless task. Adding to this problem was that Ben Hur had to provide 6 preview screening deliveries along with a trailer delivery, so shot priorities were changing constantly (which is why some artist's shot assignments changed so suddenly and drastically all the time) Fortunately my team was understanding that there was nothing one could do about it, and they performed brilliantly. By instigating weekly meetings and rewards for the team, I was able to maintain their morale. As the project dragged on -it was initially only to run 6 months but the director kept making the changes and the deadline kept being pushed- we eventually found an edit was shaping up and by having regular team screenings to show off how great their work was turning out, their morale was able to also be lifted further. I was fortunate that we had a brilliant roto/paint supervisor who handled all the outsourcing with great professionalism. It was necessary to coordinate with him frequently, because as shots would change -new plates, different plates, omits, etc- it was critical to have our outsource vendor pause work instantly as the edit changed so frequently each day. We had hoped to use 3D dust sims for the race -it was intended to become increasingly dusty/dense as the race grew more intense- in the end we were forced to use only 2D library elements for this. By layering anywhere from 12-50 separate elements in a single shot onto cards, the comp team were able to create excellent environments. There were a few shots where rotomated horses were needed to displace FX dust clouds but these shots were very rare; almost all shots had 2D dust elements. Some shots had begun as live action and became all-CGI -and in many cases, went back and forth numerous times before the director decided upon how they would be. But, we did have some shots where all-CGI horses were always the plan. Examples of this would be the shots where horses were injured/killed/falling/crashing of course, because it was important to not have any harm come to the animals in filming. One such sequence involved a chariot with grey horses crashing into the wall, one horse climbs up over the wall, into the crowded stands, jumping and kicking, kicks an innocent bystander who is in the wrong place at the wrong time- and running up the steps to the top of the coliseum. Sadly, my favourite shot form this sequence where the man is kicked in the chest by the bucking horse- was omitted from the final film despite being a feature final shot. It was one of only 3 shots I had time to comp myself, but fortunately it survives in the breakdown reel. It is also a favourite of mine because the director had provided reference footage of this exact thing taking place for real that the animation team had managed to replicate to stunning effect. (it was with a Bull during a Bullfight in Spain) Because only one small portion of the set had partial greenscreens in place, there was a great amount of roto required for anything that went above the race circuit wall or where any set extension was going to be added. This was especially problematic because the horses' manes needed extra attention for edges, and we did not wish to be eroding and losing details. However, I found the skies were in fact keyable in the shots I took care of myself, however found that the artists found that a little too complex to bother with; but I did manage to train a few of the team to use Nuke's IBK in more a advanced manner to pull a key from what appeared to be an overcast white sky. There is a great deal more complexity to the work we did on Ben Hur, however I shall finish with one of the most extreme examples; the crowds: The plan was to utilize Massive for crowd generation, however our VFX supervisor had expressed doubt of its quality and asked me to find a way to handle it entirely in comp as a backup just in case. Production had shot hundreds of plates with extras in various costumes - men, women, children, Roman Senators, Vessel Virgins, food merchants, and Roman soldiers. All were seated or standing on tiered stands against greenscreen. the challenge was to figure a way to take all these and populate the coliseum with them ASAP. We had an outstanding comp TD who was a genius with programming many of the custom tools I requested and was up to the challenging task with me, and liked the plan I had in mind: Taking the plans for the coliseum and dividing the seating areas into sections much like a contemporary sports arena, we created a map with a seating space marked for each and every person in the crowd. This gave us roughly ten thousand attendees of the event. From there, the comp team took turns cutting out each extra from a plate, keying them, providing a few copies with colour-corrected changes to create extra-extras wearing slightly different coloured clothing (thereby tripling the number of people we could use) and labelling each person as male, female, facing front, left or right, etc with a unique code our Nuke TD and I had devised for her program. Once these were ready, the comp artist did the following if they had a shot where they needed to add crowds: By following a simple reference sheet to know what different section of the coliseum was visible in the plate, they would open the custom nuke tool from a menu, indicate which stands to populate, select the appropriate crowd-facing direction, and hit enter. The program would add the crowds randomly by gender onto slightly curved cards, and as the camera moved in the shot, more persons would be added/removed as stands entered/exited camera view. If it was decided that the random crowd was not looking good enough, they could select specific persons in the shot and replace them through an additional feature in the tool. For example; some shots required cheering, and we had crowd sprites just for that however it was not necessary to have everyone cheer, so we could have some grumpy people who refused to cheer if desired to keep things interesting. As well, we had extras seated but then rise to cheering, so the artist had a lot of various elements to work with to make their audience fun for them. While taxing on the Nuke application, our TD's tool did everything I asked for it to do and the results stand out as the shots I feel look more real than the odd shots where Massive was used -primarily in the wide shots where the entire coliseum is seen. these wide shots would show the full ten thousand fans, and Nuke simple wasn't up to the task so we knew we had to use Massive for those ones. I feel one can tell what shots used Massive and which used sprites because the sprites look real. IMHO the end result of the shots using my sprites system shows what the right decision was-- the reason is simple: nothing looks more real than the real thing. it was a solution that worked brilliantly and really added realism to the shots.