Multiplying A Crowd

andythefilmer

andythefilmer

Veteran
I am about to go out to shoot a music video for a band. It starts off in a recording studio but then it will go into a shot of the band playing on a stage. We are going to hire about 200-300 extras to be the crowd but we want it to look like there's about 10,000 people. It is going to be at night but it will be lit very well. I currently own FCS 2 for my mac and if necessary, I will get Shake because I am being payed awesomely to shoot, light and edit it.
 
Should just be a matter of laying out a grid on the ground and herding the extras into each "box" and shooting it with the same camera movement over and over and over. No blue screen/ green screen involved. That's what they did in this movie I did extra work on.

Edit: Just want to add - in films that do it this way, you can sometimes pick out the same extra repeated over and over - at least I can, I'm not sure if the casual movie-goer cares though. I guess it's no biggie, and far be it from me to dictate the costume direction, but I would suggest recommending your extras to wear reversible jackets, or a button down shirt over a T-shirt, or a hat, so as they move from grid to grid, they can take off the button-down, flip their hat backwards (or remove it), reverse their jackets (or remove it altogether), just to give it more variety. I only say this because the film I worked on did not do this, they didn't even have us change our corresponding positions between grids.

Good luck.
 
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But what would be the process of editing it like that? I like the grid technique. I have not scouted the location yet but I will probably shoot the crowd in columns because it will either be indoors or outside at night so not every detail will be visible. Is it possible to do it in Final Cut Pro 6 ow would I need Shake?
 
Should be doable if you shoot with a locked-down camera - just mask each video track to show only the extras. I'd hate to try it with a moving camera though... :)
 
I just talked to the director. He wants panning shots and static full shots of the crowd so I might just shoot the pans of the available crowd then loop the video track and rotoscope out parts of the crowd and mask part of them over and stuff. I just ordered Shake 4.1.
 
At least try for nice smooth panning shots - otherwise you could waste an awful lot of time matching the movement on the multiple tracks.
 
you can also shoot a small crowd using green screen and duplicate them using the footage as a particle in particular and then match move your AE comps camera movement with the real camera movement in the scene comping in your crowd wher you want them. you have to be sure your crowd lasts long enough to span all shots so it doesnt jump loop in the middle, but looks great as a mo-graph type crowd replication. although its planar 2d in a 3d world so if you want something beyond that level of realism you should shoot match moved plates over and over moving your crowd to fill the space as other posters mentioned.
 
Or, if the resolution will allow, shoot it all statc and fairly wide, comp it, then digitally add camera moves from there. Just keep in mind that you will lose some rez, so you need to take into account how the video will be seen and what the limits of your camera are.
 
El Director said:
Or, if the resolution will allow, shoot it all statc and fairly wide, comp it, then digitally add camera moves from there. Just keep in mind that you will lose some rez, so you need to take into account how the video will be seen and what the limits of your camera are.
Click to expand...

Probably not because it will be shot SD 16:9. It may work alright though because I am uprezzing to 1080p before I edit.
 
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