Rome rebuilt in a day

Inside the Colosseum of Rome gladiators fought to the death in a sun-baked arena watched by a screaming crowd of thousands. But recreating the battles for Gladiator proved problematic. In one scene, Maximus, (Russell Crowe) faces four tigers.

When it was shot the actors played their parts perfectly, but the tigers refused to co-operate, padding passively up and down.

Special effect experts at Mill Film based in Great Marlborough Street, Soho, were called in, winning the contract against competition from Hollywood's more established houses.

Its team of 25 refilmed the tigers on their own against a blue background with trainers encouraging them to play-fight. This footage was composited with the pictures of the gladiators.

Tim Burke, special effects supervisor on the film, says: "We used a special effects package to control the action so it looked as if Maximus was close to being attacked. At some stages it really appears as if he is in great danger."

Perhaps the special effects team's most impressive achievement is a computer graphic of Rome as it existed 2,000 years ago, enabling Ridley Scott to make it appear as if a camera was sweeping over the city.

"We filmed a real scene-setting shot with a helicopter. Then we recreated Rome from the ground up and populated it with 40,000 computer graphic people. It was just like building Rome in a day," Mr Burke says.

Scott wanted to show the cinema-goer the scale of Rome, populated by more than a million people, and its majestic buildings.

Mill Film created the computer graphic city using artwork and shots of real buildings. "There are even some favourite London landmarks in there," Mr Burke admits. "We have some really great neo-classical architecture here which we've made good use of concocting views of Rome."

To build a full size replica of the arena and fill it with 35,000 spectators would have been incredibly costly. So Mill Film digitally created a Colosseum, complete with spectators, to allow the camera to show a wide shot of the arena's tiers packed with baying crowds. "You needed to get an impression of the enormous scale of the Colosseum and how the gladiators were dwarfed inside it," says Mr Burke.