All but one shot in the film - the telephoto shot of the sun rising - was created entirely using computer graphics.
The Parthenon Sculptures were digitized by 3D scanning high-quality plaster casts in the Basel Skulpturhalle museum in Switzerland, and projecting texture maps from digital photographs of the original sculptures in the British Museum.
The 3D model of the Parthenon was acquired a week in April 2003 using a panoramic 3D laser scanner. Fifty-seven scans of the Parthenon consisting of over 50 million 3D point measurements each were used to construct the computer model. Texture maps were generated using a novel process to factor out the shading from the original environmental illumination so that the Parthenon could be accurately depicted in new lighting conditions.
The time-lapse shots used high dynamic range image-based lighting to light the Parthenon with real-world illumination. The time-lapse lighting was captured on February 23, 2004 on the roof of the USC Institute for Creative Technologies in Marina del Rey, California.