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I had stopped shaving for a full month in order to have a "manly" beard to use for both this film and also Ben-Hur. So those two films were the first pics we shot. Once we verified that we indeed had pics that were useable, I could then shave my beard down to a stubble for the next batch of films. It took me a while to get into character. I also had to give a manly thunderous war cry roar, but not move my head (which had been carefully postioned and lit by Jeff). Let me just say that it is very difficult to give an emotional fierce expression while attempting to hold one's head still. Anyway, once we had both "full beard" shots in the can, we rushed them over to Jeff's workstation to see if any of them would work. This would be our first attempt to see if we could actually pull off this crazy calendar idea. We flipped through the various Leonidas head shots, and chose one that looked the best. Some of the early ones were blurry (because I moved my head), or I had my eyes closed too much, but the last few were decent. Jeff crudely cut out my head, pasted it onto the original frame, shrunk it down to size, and rotated it into the proper position. We immediately started cracking up, because it looked sweeeeeet! We knew then and there that this calendar was going to come together after all. For the final version, Jeff brightened the image a little, darkened my hair and beard, and whitened my teeth to better match the original. He even went the extra mile by blending Leonidas' eye scar onto my face as well.