Supplementing the action, Visual Effects Supervisor Jeffrey A. Okun (Stargate, Deep Blue Sea) employed CGI to add a rainfall of virtual arrows and the occasional fireball to the frenetic battle scenes. Says Okun, "A lot of times the Samurai have to ride horses while shooting arrows into a crowd of hundreds of people, and using real arrows would be too much of a safety risk, so that’s where we’ll put in the CGI. Likewise, if you see an arrow hit a horse, that won’t be real." Maintaining that the most effective visual effects are those that remain undetectable, Okun says that CGI and green-screen techniques were also instrumentally involved in a scene in which the Samurai Ujio beheads a man on a Tokyo street.
Production took on the shape of a military event. Under the stewardship of the production’s "general," Unit Production Manager Kevin de la Noy (Saving Private Ryan, Braveheart), the storyboards for what were known as the fog battle and the final battle became detailed, strategic battle plans. "Both the fog and final battles were about strategy and ingenuity," says Zwick. "Any filmmaker approaching these kinds of sequences should study Kurosawa and in fact, I watched Ran again prior to filming Glory. But, ultimately, our battles are unique to this movie and specifically driven by the situations facing the Samurai and the Imperial Army. We had to consider how traditional warriors like the Samurai with no firearms would attempt to defeat a modern force with modern weapons."
As the director points out, when the Samurai appear out of a mist-shrouded forest, descending upon the ill-prepared Imperial Army like ghostly demons, "the idea was that the Samurai would use the cover of fog for surprise, allowing them to attack swiftly and suddenly, at their discretion. There is also the psychological advantage of using the forest and the fog as cover, so that when they chose their moment to strike they would materialize as if out of nowhere, in their terrifying, ancient armor, with their legendary, lethal swords."
Zwick based this tactic and those he employed in the final battle on several historical sources, including that of famed Samurai master and martial arts teacher Miyamoto Musashi, who is credited with inventing and perfecting the technique of fighting with two swords and wrote The Book of Five Rings, a spiritual and technical manual printed in 1645. Referencing Musashi: "There are three kinds of (martial) preemption. One is when you preempt by attacking an opponent on your own initiative; this is called preemption from a state of suspension. Another is when you preempt an opponent making an attack on you; this is called preemption from a state of waiting. Yet another is when you and an opponent attack each other simultaneously; this is called preemption from a state of mutual confrontation."
Of the three, the fog battle exemplifies "preemption from a state of suspension," as the ancient master defines it: "When you want to attack, you remain calm and quiet, then get the jump on your opponent by attacking suddenly and quickly." The final battle illustrates Musashi’s second maxim, preemption from a state of waiting.
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