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.'"

Comments

And only a few years behind audio technology...

[croddy]

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.

Re:And only a few years behind audio technology...

[damburger]

Took the words right out of my mouth, although I'd like to add a much broader historical point;

One of the notable characteristics of the twentieth century was the exponential increase in the cost of producing cutting edge media. You went from printing presses to radio transmitters to movie studios within a few short decades. The consequences of this were that the public discourse became dominated by those in society who controlled the resources, be it big business or government. Thus modern propaganda was born.

A reversal of this trend is very much welcome. As it stands, some people (usually the worst people) in society have a megaphone with which to shout down anyone who disagrees with them or their peers, leaving most of us effectively voiceless and apathetic. It can only do our stagnant societies good to make some cheaper megaphones.

Re:And only a few years behind audio technology...

[Anonymous Coward]

And, much as we ignored edicts from the church prohibiting heretical publications, we will continue to ignore such attempts at stifling us.

Re:And only a few years behind audio technology...

[Chris Mattern]

When you look at summer theater fare, the cost of distributing the film often costs as much as making the film did. That business is expensive, it's not getting a lot cheaper, and unfortunately, the studios still have a lock on it.

[Looks at youtube video running in browser] Really? [Looks again] You SURE about that?

Chris Mattern

Re:And only a few years behind audio technology...

[russellh]

It makes me wonder how advanced modern digital audio is compared to special effects.

You don't need to wonder at all. CGI movies are voiced by human actors. I doubt you can voice them by synthetic actors, or add synthetic voices to live action movies. I guess there's no audio equivalent to stick figures.

Re:And only a few years behind audio technology...

[Skim123]

[Looks at youtube video running in browser] Really? [Looks again] You SURE about that?

[Looks at your bank statement showing the income you've made from sharing your YouTube video with the world] Yep, I'm sure about that.

Heh

[Finallyjoined!!!]

Pretty soon the tech will be sufficiently advanced that filmakers won't actually need those really expensive actor chappies. Yay :-)

old adage

[SoupGuru]

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.

Re:old adage

[wizardforce]

While I can appreciate the ability for those inside of the big Hollywood blockbuster to create decent effects, let's not lose sight of plot and character.

fixed that for you. Hollywood's plots aren't any better just because they have more money, in fact I suspect that because they have those kind of resources they can and do get away with a weaker plot. Hollywood needs to have competition from amateurs.

apparently the same can't be said for websites

[alta]

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.

Amateurs:

[CaptainPatent]

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.)

Overly optimistic

[eln]

'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.'" I think this is a little too optimistic. Sure, the equipment needed to make (some of) the special effects in wide use today is becoming affordable for amateurs, but the special effects industry is constantly evolving. It won't be long before the big movie studios up the bar using far more expensive equipment and more complicated techniques. It's not like special effects have reached some magical point where it's impossible for them to be any better than they are now.

Re:Overly optimistic

[Anonymous Coward]

I would also argue that movies in recent years that have used CGI almost exclusively (LOTR, new Star Wars, etc) look a heck of a lot worse than movies just 15 or 20 years old that use puppets, models and good old fashioned extras. I watched Aliens recently, and most of the effects in that movie looked more realistic than anything I have seen in the past few years, and that was made in 1986.

Take I Am Legend as example of both sides of my argument. Whatever they did to make the empty, overgrown streets of NYC was amazing. I don't know if they built a set, or CGI'd it, I couldn't tell. It was subtle and real looking. The zombies, on the other hand, looked awful. The movie did not strike me as being meant to look like a cartoon, but alas, it did. Real people in makeup would have looked a lot better than the stupid CG monsters they had.

I'm all in favor of special effects software being widely available to amateurs, but I personally think the professionals have been getting lazy.

Proliferation of fake video evidence?

[nasor]

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.

Bullshit false analogy

[belg4mit]

What self-respecting author writes in MS Word? It's all about FrameMaker baby.