Slashdot Mirror
Filming an Invasion Without Extras
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Kevin Kelly has an interesting blog post on how a World War II D-Day invasion was staged in a few days with four guys and a video camera using batches of smaller crowds replicated computationally to produce very convincing non-repeating huge crowds. Filmmakers first used computer generated crowds about ten years ago and the technique became well known in the Lord of the Rings trilogy but now crowds can be generated from no crowds at all — just a couple of people. 'What's new is that the new camera/apps are steadily becoming like a word processor — both pros and amateurs use the same one,' says Kelly. 'The same gear needed to make a good film is today generally available to amateurs — which was not so even a decade ago. Film making gear is approaching a convergence between professional and amateur, so that what counts in artistry and inventiveness.'"
It's been a few years now that amateur musicians could produce quality recordings at home with only a few thousand dollars worth of gear -- you only need to go to a traditional studio anymore to get into the real upper echelon of production value. It is nice to see movement in the same direction in cinema. Even if the entire entertainment industry insists on clinging desperately to 50-year-old ideas about copyright, despite the inevitable consequence of that doomed ideology, it's nice to know that we can lose them all and still not lose cinema and music as artistic media.
While that is cool technology, it also means my chance of ever being in a movie just dropped from "extremely slim" to "Nicole Richie". :(
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
Pretty soon the tech will be sufficiently advanced that filmakers won't actually need those really expensive actor chappies. Yay :-)
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
Looks like a good time to revisit one of my favorite sayings when it comes to special effects in movies: just because you can doesn't mean you should.
While I can appreciate the ability for those outside of the big Hollywood blockbuster to create decent effects, let's not lose sight of plot and character.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
To bad we can' quote
'The same gear needed to make a good website is today generally available to amateurs -- which was not so even a decade ago'
And for the sake of argument, lets define the website as the code, the database, the webserver and the network hooking it all up.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Indeed technology is reaching the point that amateurs have access to many of the same tools and software (or derivatives of). Not only can this be evidenced by the production technique stated in the article, but also in many Youtube videos. Even though many of the videos were recorded and edited by amateurs, they are beginning to rival what's shown on TV. (with the writer's strike I'd even say that Youtube in some instances is better than what's on TV.)
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Looking at some of the crap Hollywood churns out these days, the convergence between professional and amateur cannot come too soon for me.
I can't believe I just wrote that.
It's not what you think. You're disgusting!
It's not all it's cracked up to be.
I was an extra in the Da Vinci Code, apart from 3 breakfasts & 2 lunches every day, everything else was exceptionally boring. Especially where a bunch of us had to do the same thing 30 times, but in different places, to simulate a big crowd.
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
...the Townswomen's Guild reenactment of the Battle of Pearl Harbor.
Chris Mattern
It's quite obvious that cgi can only go to real life quality and not beyond. We're already there and we have the instruments to create a movie that could fool anyone believing it's non-cgi. But now that we're there, the tools must be improved to make it cheaper, faster and easier to produce. This method sounds like a logical step in the evolution of cgi. Eventually, there will be plugins for virtually everything that scripts skin behavior, trees, etcetera.
Props to these guys for improving massive battle scenes even further. I don't think I can get enough of it.
Full Tilt
Did anyone tell the Batley Townswomen's Guild? I wonder what they would make of it!
I'm sorry I can't remember the name of the film, but I remember seeing a silent film that used a small crowd moved around in the frame to make it look like a large horde of people were attacking. I forget if they used costume changes to make it non-repeating. I am truly amazed at the incremental improvement technology has provided us some 80 years later.
(Meanwhile, a film critic friend of mine offered to take me to see a new movie made by the creator of "Lost". He said the only reason why he's skeptical of whether he'll enjoy it is because the shots he's seen make it quite obvious it was done with digital cameras.)
Good simulations for cheap are inevitable, but they are still just simulations. A studio with a big budget wanting that big-budget look to a movie can still cast a thousand extras and really drive home a crowd scene way better than any computer effect for the foreseeable future. Also, while computer animation of even a single character is now extremely realistic, it's still not a real actor, and we're probably hundreds of generations from having real-life simulated actors (i.e. they "appear" like a hologram on set). Even in the music examples, while you can get cheap good equipment now, it is still really difficult to sound-proof a room without spending some serious cash, thus the master tapes will come out with some room color unless you have an expensive studio. Still, nice to note progress on the simulation channels.
stuff |
While I agree with many of the sentiments you mention, posting such things in this topic just makes you look like an idiot. It doesn't really get your point across, and for the most part you are just preaching to the choir. Anyone who would disagree with you on some or all of the points you mention will just ignore you for posting an offtopic message with the really annoying "yOUR" phrase... You diminish the value of such ideas by constructing them in such a way that they are just annoying, instead of being pertinent...
Insert witty sig here.
how long did it take in post? What software did they use?
"The same gear needed to make a good film is today generally available to amateurs -- which was not so even a decade ago."
A "good film" does not necessarily require advanced technology. What ever happened to a good story and good acting?
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
...they didn't use this technique to generate huge crowds of servers.
I've read a couple of posts here that have said, in effect, "well, yeah, but CGI characters are never as realistic as filmed actors." Which only shows that they haven't RTFA. The filmmakers shot four guys running over the same stretch of sand multiple times, then digitally composited them together (along with other practical effects) to make a crowd. None of the extras were CGI.
I mean, if technology was making one of the content industries irrelevant, they'd send off their lobbyists to make the tech illegal. I fear the extras have no such power - not even a union!
That is cool but I can see where it would get boring, definitely. Then again...free food :D
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
Both as positive and negative evidence.
It will be as easy to "prove" that somebody was somewhere else as it is that someone was at the scene of a crime. Or that YOU were part of that riot mob at the football stadium.
Yesterday's movie fiction - today's reality.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
That's great. Now all they need is a few more little things to round things out. Let's see--a well-written script, some decent actors, a good sense of cinematography and creative vision. Nah, screw all that. We've got effects!
This guy's the limit!
I'm glad the quality has improved so much. Thanks Technology! It's clear that's been the vital missing element in film making.
I'm not so sure that fancier effects are what makes a film "good". I guess their point is that even indie films no longer have to worry about acting and writing since they can make it pretty just like Hollywood.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRS9cpOMYv0
What's new is that the new camera/apps are steadily becoming like a word processor -- both pros and amateurs use the same one,
Oh man, the porn, the porn!
Seriously, can anyone point to a video production product that is anywhere close to the ease of a word processor? And I am being serious.
http://freedomsforums.com/viewtopic,p,1769.html
ps how do you change the text of the link? I forget.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
He had a man keep taking a different hat out of a box and ask for a ticket, with the caption "BBC Economy Crowd Scene". No CGI required :)
How long will it be before it's trivially easy for an amature to fake incriminating video footage? Sure, it might be technically possible for an expert to do some kind of analysis that detects it as a forgery, but does anyone really think that the police/DA are going to call up JPL and ask them to process it? They'll almost certainly just shrug and say "Well, it shows person X doing Y, let's arrest him. It will be an easy conviction - it's caught it on tape!" Good luck if you can't afford to hire an expert of your own to analyze the footage.
Invasions that involve hardly anyone at all?
Too bad we can't do that in real life.
Gosh! That was deep and out of character for me.
Um, uh, in Soviet Russia... uh... you profit from a beowulf cluster of these... or something.
I watched the Richard Hammond fronted Timewatch episode and the effect wasn't that impressive. It's impressive that they managed it on such a shoestring but it still looked very fake. Still, it has a lot of potential and had a little more impact than the usual 10 guy re-enactment of the Battle of Waterloo recreations that the history docs are so often filled with.
> with one tiny little section of ravenous fans
One would have thought that after 3 breakfasts & 2 lunches every day, the crowd would not have been quite so hungry?
No elevenses? No tea-breaks? Tsk.
I know I'm not the only one that feels this way so here goes. Ponca City, we don't love you. While the huge oil refinery you house is nice for the economy, it isn't exactly pleasing to the eyes. To the strip club on the east side of town: I regret visiting you and ending up dancing on stage attempting to win free beer.
Anyways, to sum up my feelings about Ponca City: If my parents hadn't moved there, I would hardly know that you existed and I wouldn't have missed much.
chillax137
The blurb from the slashdot submitter makes it sound like they used computers to generate a huge crowd, when in fact it was just the same 3/4 people running up the beach themselves, then walking back, and doing it all over again in a different direction. Lord of the Rings used a computer program to generate the actors which were completely CGI... this was just splicing all the recordings together.. a lot simpler (and in a way nearly as complex).
There's a lot more to a high-quality production than special effects. Most films produced cheaply, even with the best possible special effects, feel inauthentic. The stories told with special effects are less interesting than the stories told with real people.
Bad lighting for example, will make a scene feel cheap and take the viewer out of the story. Good lighting does require a fair bit of money: you need many, many instruments, carefully balanced. "Reality" isn't nearly as convincing: it leaves distracting shadows that you don't notice when you're there because you're immersed in the scene and unconsciously correcting for where the sun is, where the trees and buildings are, etc.
It takes a huge amount of time and effort to set those up properly. It also takes a highly skilled operator to know what's going to work, and that operator has to work in conjunction with the cameras, the set, the makeup artists, the costume designers, etc.
A really professional and polished TV show or movie is an immensely unwieldy beast. And incredibly expensive, because so many of those people are standing around doing nothing so much of the time, but an adjustment by any one of them can involve an effort by all of them.
You probably think you don't need all this stuff, but it's because when it's well done, you don't notice any of it. It looks as if the sun just happened to be in the right place, the camera lens just happened to match what your eye would have done under the circumstance, the sound just happened to capture what you think your eyes are seeing...
Trust me, nothing on a movie or TV stage "just happens". You can produce some nice small films and pass off the cheap feel as "indie", and such films often wonderfully highlight the acting, directing, and writing talent. But even a small professional movie costs millions of dollars, and the effect is vastly more enjoyable to most people. They can't say why because they don't know what they're looking at, and that's all to the good, but it doesn't mean that they don't have preferences.
Finally, we will be able to see a glimpse of the world as it really exists when the compositited together people start walking through each other.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I recall Forest Gump had the first fake crowd scene by digitally replicating a small number of people. Then its been used a mass scale since then- Gladiator, Phantom Manace, Disney Hunchback of Notre Dame, Lord of the Rings, Troy, to name a few.
I would doubt the LotR crowds were created any differently.
Actually they were created very differently. At the time, there was a big deal made about the crowd scenes being entirely computer-generated using the program "Massive". Several 3D characters were animated and given crowd-behavior AI, then replicated into a large group with each character instance figuring out how to behave in relation to other nearby characters. (One character, an Ura-Kai (sp?) in Battle of Helm's Deep, reportedly stops and takes a cell-phone call. But I digress...)
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
So actually you were so good, they included you in the same scene 30 times! Do they increase your daily rate for the duplication?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I, for one, welcome our new computer-generated overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil on their underwater limpet mines.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Beady eyed pendant? As a pedant with perfectly normal eyes, I take offense!
Also, wasn't the Nicole Richie remark an eating disorder joke? Doesn't she have an eating disorder? If not, she should get one, if only to help make /. less incorrect.
riahttp://www.harkyman.com/bp.html
Is it quite as advanced as Massive, no, but I did some test renders a few years ago on a spare BSD box I had and it worked pretty well with a 1000 "Actors". It took a few hours to calculate out the frames and even more to render, but the results are acceptable. I believe the developer has a few demo videos available.
Blender's not perfect, the particle engine is in need of a massive overhaul and volumetric lighting is needed. While model import has gotten better, it's still not perfect. For some strange reason, the earlier 2.41 and 2.3.x versions handled lightwave models a bit better than the latest releases.
I've toyed with Cinelerra before, but I had some issues with capture cards, etc.. Jahshaka is coming along.
I'm not running out and replacing FCP/Shake/Lightwave any time soon. Mainly because I already have those apps and know how to use them. And the folks I do work for are running on the same set-ups (usually minus Shake.)
Even on the low cost side, FXhome's suite has some nice features for the $150 price point of Effects lab pro. Also, their compositing application is far more forgiving than a lot of the higher priced professional tools. So if someone shoots a greenscreen shot without proper lighting, I can go in with Composite lab (or VisionLab Studio) and do the composite a lot quicker than in Shake sometimes. (Especially if it's DV footage).
Even iLife is pretty powerful these days. Probably for 90% of the editing I do, I could get buy with iMovie (things like Weddings), or even Final Cut Express.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
text of blog:
Making feature films with cheap video equipment, supplemented with lots of computer processing, is nothing new. Many scenes of blockbuster films have been made this way, even if the entire film is not. And a few hit movies in recent years have been filmed this way entirely. The difference between actual location, a set, or computer graphics is almost nil in the eye of the audience, so this liberates the film makers from the costs and hassles of staging scenes in costly locations. With computers as cameras you can generate whatever you can imagine.
That part of film magic is evident in any "making-of" movie. What's new is that the new camera/apps are steadily coming becoming like a word processor -- both pros and amateurs use the same one. The great script is not due to a better word processor; it's how the great write uses it. Likewise, a great film is not due to better gear. The same gear needed to make a good film is today generally available to amateurs -- which was not so even a decade ago. Film making gear is approaching a convergence between professional and amateur, so that what counts in artistry and inventiveness.
The newest frontier shaped by this parity seems to be making large-scale films without a lot of extras. Computer generated crowds were first used a decade ago, and reached some public awareness in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In this memorable scenes batches of smaller crowds were replicated computationally to produce very convincing non-repeating huge crowds. But if you are cheap, desperate and inventive, smaller crowds can be generated from no crowds at all -- just a couple of people.
Here's a clip demonstrating how a World War II D-Day invasion was staged in a few days with four guys and video camera.
Youtube link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=WRS9cpOMYv0
Note: not sure if I found the correct version, Richard Hammond presents just three guys. But this is too cool anyway... Just watch it!
Just in case you were wondering, the 1956 film The Ten Commandments, used 14,000 extras and 15,000 animals in the production of the movie. ahref=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049833/triviarel=url2html-15700http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049833/trivia>
Also, in the 1993 film Gettysburg, for scenes such as Picket's charge, they would film a few companies of re-enactors, and then duplicate them to create Picket's division.
You do realize that a lot of the striking writers have moved to youtube don't you?
----
Anyway I wanted to bounce an idea off the crowd concerning a form of machinima. See what you all thought. How about what I would call "living books". You could for example have a fully 3D interactive DIY home improvement mod. Showing you how to wire a house and the consequences for doing it wrong. So what do you all think?
*NM*
I'm hoping that technology will keep driving down the cost of making a movie.
The cheaper it is to make a movie, the easier it is to get the movie made, and made properly.
Say some young hotshot has a great idea for this weird, quirky movie. If it costs a lot of money, the studio will start pushing the guy around. No, don't cast that guy as the lead, cast one of our proven stars. No, take out that sarcastic sub-plot; it might offend someone. The more money is at stake, the less risk they will allow, and the more they will want to push it into the tried-and-true just-another-Hollywood-movie mold.
So, I'm hoping that cheaper movies might turn out to be better movies, because the original artistic vision of the creator will be allowed to be realized.
Of course there is a problem on the opposite extreme: since no one could say "no" to George Lucas, he went ahead and made Star Wars Episode I and the other prequels. I wish someone could have said "No, that submarine-through-the-core sequence is stupid, strip it out. No, the pod race sequence is just too long. No, Jar Jar is too annoying."
At least if movies are cheaper, there will be more of them. Hopefully more movies will result in more great movies.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
In 1996 it was used in Forrest Gump with some computer-assistance, but it was also used in a bunch of old Russian movies to generate crowds by placing people at specific points of a grid and then overlaying the footage.
Unfortunately not, though, apart from the free food (Copious amounts) the daily rate was quite good.
:-)
Plus the stand in for Audrey was really tasty
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
All kidding aside, it all comes down to the bottom line. It's sad really, think of the classics like Ben Hur or The 10 Commandments. When they wanted a crowd, they got off their butts and hired a crowd of people. If you watch some of those older movies, it's amazing how much better the crowds looked with real people. It's a sad state of affairs when 50+ year old movie effects can outshine what we make today.
Unfortunately, that's where we're heading. It's cheaper to make a hundred people on the computer than to actually hire a hundred people for a day. Pretty soon, everything's going to be like Beowulf - we'll see the likenesses of actors rendered onscreen. Why hire them if you can make them do what you want on the computer for a fraction of the cost?
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. But light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
It's nice to see the promise of the original Video Toaster finally coming true. It might have taken 15 years, but we may truly have brought video production to the masses.
The problem with the Video Toaster was that all of the other equipment was so expensive because you still had to do the Analog-to-Digital-to-Analog conversion and what the Video Toaster really succeeded in doing was bringing cheaper equipment to the professionals (The Tonight Show, Seaquest DSV, and Babylon 5 to name a few all used Amiga 2000 based Video Toasters).
With todays all digital technology and the mass distribution that widely available broadband internet, directors are no longer limited by small budgets. One of the best examples of this is Robert Rodríguez serves as writer, producer, director, editor, director of photography, camera operator, steadicam operator, composer, production designer, visual effects supervisor, and sound editor on his films.
I played a corpse once...in the snow...for an hour.
At least I died facing up so I could watch clouds go by. But my ass was numb when we were done.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
There have been a couple of comments to the effect of 'Extras don't cost THAT much, do they?'
No, Extras don't cost that much. A non-union extra gets paid about $75 for a day's work, where a day can be half an hour or 14 hours. A union Extra might get $125 and a better sandwich.
The problem is that it takes forever to organize and shoot scenes with a lot of extras, particularly where even a couple of people acting like douchebags can wreck the whole scene. The last film I did any extra work on was 'My Super Ex Girlfriend' and there were about 200 of us in the small park at 72nd and Broadway here in NYC. Our job was to gawk at a building on fire. Sounds pretty simple, right?
Yeah, until you realize that 3/4 of the extras think that being an extra is their ticket to fame. I happened to get 'placed' right near one of the lead actors as he emerged from the subway, and as we shot and re-shot one minute of that scene 5 times (over the course of 7 hours), other extras would elbow me out of the way because they wanted to be 'near the star.' There is a whole sham community around being an extra where you attend a class outside of New York or LA and some local agent in your nearest mid-size city (say, Philadelphia) 'signs' you and just sends you out on a bunch of extra calls. The agent gets a fixed rate for every warm body they send, you spend a day doing very little, and your agent hopes you never realize that real actors don't work that way.
If I were producing that or any other movie with extras, I'd use as few extras as possible. Not to save money. Just to save the people I am actually employing full-time a lot of aggravation.
Perl, PHP, Ruby, etc are all widely used in large successful web-sites and are free to use by anyone. If you're feeling technologically savvy you can install Apache (again used by many large successful sites) on your own computer free of charge and run your own server out of house. If you want a database you can use MySQL which is used by many large successful sites for free on your own site.
The two main issues are the server and the network connection. Even the cheapest PC available from Dell (about $329) will be able to run the web and database server sufficiently until you need a second computer to split roles. A used PIII 933 is sufficient and what I use. By the time you need one system for Apache and one system for MySQL you should be making more than the cost of the additional computer per month in revenue. You do not need a Quad Xenon system from Intel to get started running a popular web-site. As use increases so does revenue. If it doesn't, then you're failing at business and need to find a new career path.
If you're lucky, port 80 is open on your home internet connection. If so, the possibilities are endless. If not, save yourself a lot of money and effort and use shared hosting with a company like GoDaddy. Then just configure a server in house for development.
Currently I spend all of about $50 a month running my web-sites including my home internet connection. I pull in around $5 per day in revenue. That's a 300% return. Two years ago I pulled in over $5500 in one year from a web-site that cost $9 for the domain and $7 a month for hosting at GoDaddy. I fully developed the site in 1 week.
There's very little that the amature can't get into with little to no investment and make a return. All it depends on is how much you're willing to learn or how much you're willing to pay someone else to learn for you. It takes personal talent and/or talented friends.
Work Safe Porn
That's the thing I keep coming back to with all this crap. It costs money to shoot a movie. Even when we're talking about a shoestring budget, it still costs thousands. A script costs nothing more than the time it takes to write it. You can write it on a $1 notebook if you wanted to, screw laptops. But nobody seems to pay attention to the scripts. Hey, movie guy -- if you're going to throw $100 million into a picture, why not throw a million at an award-winning writer and see if you might make a picture worth watching?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
extras are cheap but good period costume rental is not.
you'd still greenscreen any difficult scenes (i.e. the climibing ones) as who wants a take ruined by one of 500 extras picking his nose and you dont notice till post?
Boring depends on what movie you were in. I was an extra in the fetish club scene from The Matrix Revolutions - 6 days work which consisted of about 8 hours on set and the rest of the week chatting to cute girls in latex.
...but so what? You still need at least one human that knows the mechanics of film. Even if you're assembling a composite, the important stuff like camera angles, lighting, composition, balance, layout, and color are incredibly important. Stuff like this can be storyborded, but until all of the elements are assembled, there's no telling what the final product is going to be.
What self-respecting author writes in MS Word? It's all about FrameMaker baby.
Were that I say, pancakes?
I'd be really interested to see if it worked out this way. Many popular actors (perhaps not all) aren't demonstrably better at acting than a vast number of other actors who aren't popular. They bring in lots of money because people recognise them, and are more likely to see a movie because they can see that actor. Sometimes people might watch a movie because of the director, but almost nobody who I know would go to see a movie because of the screenplay writer, or the audio mixing guys. Would the creative people behind some brilliant CGI really end up being treated any differently?
Personally I don't think they would. There are plenty of occasions where the people behind the scenes, responsible for all the creativity, have simply been pulled out and replaced... and people have kept watching because the front of the show has stayed the same. The Simpsons is a great example. Early episodes are very different from later episodes, and the differences coincide a lot with the changes in writers and directors. Most people who I've spoken to like one or the other, but they rarely like both. The change was gradual enough, though, to keep the show around and popular long enough for the viewer base to change without its popularity falling over.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=WRS9cpOMYv0
as announced on CreativeCow.net forums where the actual bloke who made it posted it. somebodys getting some blog hits for somebody else's work...
How do you get to be an extra, anyway? It seems like a fairly lucrative thing to do when between jobs.
I've said it for years... and finally you see it? There was no Hitler, there was no war. They were all summoned to hide the treasure of the Illuminati. This proof will end years of misinformation.
For want of a better term, this is what the same people running over the same set X number of times and digitally duplicated still don't do right. Take the armies of clones marching in SW:AOTC and the like. They look copied, motion-capture aside.
Now if these 40 extras had minute and random differences - such as strapping some heavy weight to one ankle, to alter their running gait _just slightly_, or put on platform soles to alter their height just slightly) then that might be enough to produce a realistic effect of a real crowd.
Most studio films avoid recycling their voice actors in obvious ways, but this is far from the case for television where they are expected to voice at least THREE characters without "overtime pay". Think of your favorite cartoon and how many speaking characters might appear during the course of a single 22-minute episode, and you could probably still get all of the voice actors in a phone booth (without it having to be a TARDIS).
Let's look at The Simpsons, for example:
Dan Castellaneta: Homer Simpson, Grampa Abraham Simpson, Barney Gumble, Krusty the Clown, Groundskeeper Willie, Mayor Quimby, Hans Moleman, Sideshow Mel, Itchy, Kodos, Gil, Poochie, Squeaky-Voiced Teen, Burn's Lawyer, Mr. Teeny, Bill Clinton
I will refrain from doing the same for Hank Azaria or Harry Shearer, but most notable is the number of major characters that are the ONLY one performed by a given actor: Lisa Simpson is voiced by Yeardley Smith, who does no other characters (major or minor). Julie Kavner covers Marge and both sisters, which makes sense (they're SUPPOSED to sound a lot alike).
So just like the Omaha Beach film, you can cover a lot of ground with a small handful of talented, motivated, and organized voice actors, or possibly just one. The difference is that this is not new and has never required a lot of technology -- as amply demonstrated by Mel Blanc.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Hrm, IAAVFXA (I am a VFX artist) and I was lead on a similar project in november last year. We did a number of crowd scenes and got principal photography out of the way in two days with a cast and crew of 9 - 10. However it would be extremely disingenuous to claim that 10 people made those shots in two days. A LOT of pre-production planning was done that probably all told equals about 2 months work for 1 person. AND more to the point those shots are still in post production (i'm avoiding working on one of them right now) and that's 4 operators working for about 6 weeks so far.
Yes the cameras are cheaper. Yes the software costs practically nothing. No, 4 amateurs could not pull that off in 4 days. Those guys are obviously talented compositors and spent a LOT of time sorting out the post production.
-Steve http://www.stevennicholson.com
Does this remind anyone else of BF1942, where all the good guys look alike and all the bad guys look alike? ...World War or Clone War? :-)
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
You think that's bad?
I played a dead horse in the snow in Indigènes.
I'll finally be able to shoot that threesome porn tape with my girlfriend...
Uh huh. So in the slashdot world, someone cracks the code and everyone including Joe Blow can use an advance solution, but apparently the police are incapable of gaining access to the very same? Something's wrong with this picture.
The same technology that makes the product available for free, makes it so cheap to produce that amateurs are able to do it.
factor 966971: 966971
You think that's bad? I played a guard supposed to have his throat slith in a viking movie. The genius of a film director had forgotten to bring plastic knives, so the throat slithing was done with a real knife, only that the murderer turned the blade around to the dull edge before touching my throat.
God, I was an idiot agreeing to that.
(Not to mention the fighting scenes, which were supposed to be done at half-speed, and then being speeded up in the studio. The moron I had to fight (with a HUGE sword against my tiny, tiny axe) didn't belive in half-speed, so it felt like fighting for my life. That particalur guy was an extra, too, recruited from the local SWAT team. Me, a skinny geek with a small axe, facing some brute with a huge sword. Thank God they shoot you nowadays instead of using swords.)