Production notes from director Tony Comely, who worked with Sherbet to animate the dramatic sequences in the film.
The animated sequences of The Untold Invasion of Britain were designed to give the impression that archaeologists had unearthed an eighteen-hundred-year-old year old film, documenting Septimius Severus and his attempt to conquer the whole of the British Isles for his empire.
Each part of Severus' story was filmed using a cast of actors and extras, against green screen. Once edited, the footage was animated and composited into the third century world. This made it possible to create camera moves which could swoop seamlessly from thousands of feet in the air and down onto the faces of the soldiers in an invading army.
To distinguish the historical scenes from the modern day live action we degraded the footage and bled the colours into each other, before adding a flicker and grain to replicate the appearance of old archive reels. The effect is designed to heighten not just the historicity of the piece, but also the melancholy surrounding the later period of Severus' life.
The latest available software was used to construct a full army from just a dozen actors, to visualise the true scale of third century clashes. One scene shows Severus' army in it's entirety stretching across several acres of hostile Scottish hills, and another depicts the moment of collision between two armies numbering 10,000 each side.
Find out more about Sherbet animations.
You can see production stills from the animated work on the film, here.
