Over 450 graphic designers were chosen for the project, the largest team ever assembled for a Sony Pictures Imageworks-produced movie as of 2007. Designers at Imageworks generated new animation tools for facial, body and cloth design especially for the movie, and elements of keyframe animation were incorporated into the film in order to capture the facial expressions of the actors and actresses. The mead hall battle scene near the beginning of the film, among others, required numerous props that served as additional markers; these markers allowed for a more accurate manifestation of a battlefield setting as the battle progressed. However, the data being collected by the markers slowed down the studios' computer equipment and five months were spent developing a new save/load system that would increase the efficiency of the studios' resources. To aid in the process of rendering the massive quantities of information, the development team used cached data. In the cases that using cached data was not possible, the scenes were rendered using foreground occlusion, which involves the blurring of different overlays of a single scene in an attempt to generate a single scene film.