For almost ten years, Frantic Films, located in the three different locations across North America with offices in Winnipeg, Canada, Vancouver, and Los Angeles, Calif., has been delivering world-class visual effects to major feature film projects. Combining extensive experience in post visual effects production, previsualization, look development and custom R&D solutions. Frantic Films’ VFX award-winning visual effects teams have worked on films including Watchmen, Dragonball Evolution, Red Cliff, W., Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D, Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer, Grindhouse, Superman Returns, X-Men 3, Poseidon and many others. Frantic Films VFX, has contributed a number of visual effects shots — including one of the film’s key naval battle scenes-for the John Woo-directed epic, “Red Cliff.” The most expensive Chinese-language picture ever made, “Red Cliff” is a co-production of China Film Group, South Korea’s Showbox Entertainment, Taiwan’s CMC Entertainment group and Japan’s Avex Entertainment, and hits Asian and European theaters in Jan. 2009.

“Red Cliff” is based on the historic Battle of Red Cliffs and other events during the end of the Han Dynasty and immediately prior to the period of the Three Kingdoms in ancient China. The film stars such Asian heavyweight talents as Tony Leung, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Zhang Fengyi and many others. In Asia, the film premieres in theaters in two parts clocking in at four and a half hours. The first part was released in July 2008 to huge critical acclaim and box office success, while the second half — on which Frantic Films VFX worked — releases in Asian theaters in January 2009. In Europe and the US, the two parts of the movie will be condensed into one two and a half hour film. Release date for the US has not yet been set.

The Epic Battle Scene

Frantic was given an important part of one of the main battle sequences of the second film, and was tasked with creating the entire environment surrounding a massively destructive attack waged on an enormous fleet of ships — all within a very truncated eight-week production schedule.
“With shots that called for a fleet of 2,500 of the same 26-meter boats, giving each of the boats a unique ‘hand-crafted’ feel was both a creative and technical challenge,” explained Jason Crosby, VFX Supervisor, Frantic Films VFX. “We really wanted to avoid the repetitive look that comes from using the same CG model. To do this, we broke the boats down into components that were randomly assembled using a rule-based particle system called Thinking Particles, which also propagated and animated the fleet.”





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