The working life of Museum of London

In advance of our Gladiator Games in July, and following on from our last post detailing the start of our gladiatorial training (click here to read), we are able to share with you a behind the scenes look as the Britannia re-enactment group take a break from their training to work on a film performance for our upcoming iPhone and iPad app Streetmuseum Londinium.

To complement the games, the Museum has joined forces with TV channel HISTORY™ to launch this free app, following the huge success of Streetmuseum launched in May 2010. The new app will bring Roman London to life using a combination of never-before-seen technologies, with users able to ‘excavate’ artefacts, view augmented reality scenes of Londinium and explore overlaid maps of the ancient and modern city.

Britannia’s gladiators were used in the filming  of one of these scenes of Roman London life for the app. Using ‘green screen’ technology, they recreated scenes of gladiators battling it out in the amphitheatre that once stood in the Guildhall Yard (the location for the upcoming Gladiator Games).

There are some different requirements when filming in front of green screen backgrounds, for instance sometimes you’re required to react to things that aren’t there and more importantly for the film makers, nothing must be too reflective, so armour has to be dulled down with grease or wax polish. If any large areas of green are reflected, then the odd appearance of what is jokingly called ‘holes in time and space’ can occur on the armour, making the special effects editor’s job very hard to patch up.

So the gladiators deliberately didn’t clean the armour before hand, and chose to wear padded armour on their limbs, to cut down chances of reflection. Larger shields were also ditched because of the chances of injury and damage to other props and camera equipment in the confined space. A net was chosen with larger holes to cut down the chance of a mesh effect in front of the background.

The film crew had sand delivered as a fighting surface, and after several rehearsals - the gladiators were ready to go!

You can see the completed scene in all its glory when Streetmuseum Londinium launches on iTunes on 25 July. Until then we can share an example of  Britannia’s film work with you in this extract from the children’s series Horrible Histories on YouTube (external link).