The Last Samurai: Australia's Rising Sun Pictures (RSP) uses SOFTIMAGEIXSI to revisit old Japan in Edward Zwick's The Last Samurai.(Company Profile)

For a film like Edward Zwick's The Last Samurai to look realistic, it would have to look bloody. Put simply, the world of swords, arrows, throwing stars and lethal darts is a most messy one. Striving for an unparalleled level of realistic gore but unwilling to sacrifice any flesh-and-blood extras, VFX supervisor Jeff Okun turned to Sydney's Rising Sun Pictures (RSP) for help. As they so often do, RSP fired up SOFTIMAGEIXSI.

In the film, Tom Cruise plays Nathan Algren, a former American soldier haunted by his past. Down on his luck, Algren accepts a job training a newly modernized Japanese army to fight the relentlessly honorable, but entirely outgunned Samurai, few of whom remain in the new Japan. Following a calamitous first battle, Algren is captured and taken to a Samurai village headed by Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe).

Over time, Algren comes to appreciate, then prefer and finally embrace the ways of the Samurai. Just as he is doing so, however, a slew of government-paid Ninjas arrive to assassinate Katsumoto. In one particularly memorable instance, a throwing star slices into a man's neck. RSP neatly removed the rubber prosthetic worn by the actor and returned a perfect replica of his neck to his shoulders. The razor-sharp star is, therefore, actually in the actor's neck, if only digitally.

"It's an exciting, brutal and rather gruesome sequence." says Tim Crosbie. VFX Supervisor at RSR "The fighting is so intense and at such close quarters that it was far too dangerous to have people running around with large swords, shooting arrows and throwing darts and stars. For that reason. we made heavy use of XSI to create and animate photorealistic ...