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 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.
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.
While that is cool technology, it also means my chance of ever being in a movie just dropped from "extremely slim" to "Nicole Richie". :(
Your chances actually dropped to that level about 15 years ago.
I'm not normally one to drop the "!news" tag, but how do you guys think filmmakers have been creating these gigantic crowds over the past decade? There was a special feature on the Gladiator DVD that showed them doing exactly this - it went through the entire process of it. There were only ever about 40 people in the Colosseum during any given fight; they were digitally duplicated to create the illusion of a huge crowd. (It's pretty comical to watch the scenes as they were filmed, with one tiny little section of ravenous fans and the rest of the place empty.)
That wasn't the first time the technique has been used, it's just an easy one to reference. I would doubt the LotR crowds were created any differently.
Advanced recording technology may be more readily available, but is it really comparable to CGI? While LotR used computer-generated crowds seamlessly, they still recorded 30,000 cricket fans to replicate the sound of Uruk-hai at the Battle of Helm's Deep. It makes me wonder how advanced modern digital audio is compared to special effects.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRS9cpOMYv0
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.
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.
Yeah, but...
There are two sides to the film business. Production (the business of turning a script and thousands of man hours of work into 2 hours of film) and distribution (the business of copying that 2 hours of film, getting copies to the theaters, DVDs printed, advertisements run, etc. etc.).
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. While new technology will allow you to make a feature film more cheaply if you're clever, getting it out of the film festival
circuit and into real cinemas where people besides your friends will see it is still largely locked in that bad old world of Hollywood distribution.
Music has been set free not only by cheaper production, but much cheaper distribution. Broadband means I can stream songs from your band's myspace page in real time. I still can't do that with film at any reasonable quality level.
I don't think it's hopeless. The quantity of bandwidth marches upwards year after year, and the cost we pay for it goes down, but I don't think we're there yet.
I hope you're purposefully being a bit obtuse here. He got 30,000 people to yell scripted orcish war chants. Not the same thing as what you or I could do.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
;D
As far as movies go, check out this video.
I found and downloaded via their torrent link the whole DVD. it's nearly a 4 Gig download. amazing what a couple guys from New Jersey and some computer equipment came up with for their home brewed 'Star Wars' film.
I suspect this is part of the reason Concast terminated the Internet accounts of several neighbors and friends. There are lots of videos out on the Internet like this. All available to legally download I might add (you can't imagine how many idiots keep claiming I must be doing something wrong...).
Reign of the Fallen is IMO an excellent video and shows where the Internet is going.
Now if America ONLY had the Infrastructure to handle the demand.
Oh well.. there's always Canada right
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
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.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I am always amazed at the high quality of some of the fan films on the net. They are made by amateurs on shoestring budgets, but outstrip a lot of the professional garbage with much higher budgets. Bravo to these filmmakers.
But I have to ask the question:
Is anyone out there making amateur films that don't take place in the Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Matrix, or other insanely-overdone-fan-universe? Does it always have to be SciFi?! Fer cryin' out loud, is there anyone out there with any originality?!
Make up your own characters, plots, universes, and situations, and I will have far more respect for your craft. Rip off an existing universe, and you're just another fan, no matter how high quality your film is.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
It's not as easy as you'd think.
;)
One night in 2002, while playing the Call of Cthulhu RPG, a group of us decided to see how hard it would be to make a movie with existing technology. We figured we'd shoot a movie based on one of our player's unpublished vampire hunter novels. Original characters, original works.
Of course, we had no idea what we were doing. We planned it out over a few weeks, and, after twenty hours of shooting and a couple of months of editing, we had answered our question.
Was it good? Not really. But for some reason it played really well on Cable Access.
So we made another movie. Then another. Finally, in 2005, we decided to put the main character and her story to bed with a feature-length project. Took four months to shoot, and another four to edit and score, but in the end we even had a theatrical premiere for all involved. Heck, it even got reviewed. Not bad for a freely-available flick.
But back during the production of our second flick, the Starship Exeter folks released their first thirty minute episode. A few months later, New Voyages came out with their first piece.
You've heard of both of those guys. You've probably never heard of us.
No big; the fan film folks sunk a lot more time and money into their projects. (All of our movies combined cost less than the first thirty minute episode of Exeter.) They deserve their audience and their accolades.
That being said, the audience numbers for many is the key to "success" in amateur video. No mystery as to why; making movies is hard work. If someone chooses to throw the time and effort into shooting even a simple, silly script, they want to get it seen. Fan films by their very nature do have a much larger built-in audience than original fiction. That means that, no matter what, a derivative work will generate more hits than "Original Detective Movie #8."
I've seen this myself. My son and I threw together this little short this summer, but only put it up on YouTube a month ago. Then, last week, we put up this Star Trek: Phase II animation last week. In one week, the Star Trek video has generated nearly as many views as the original little video generated in a month.
The upshot? Our next project is a loving Star Trek parody. Both because I'm sick of writing angsty vampire stuff (one can only channel an emo goth chick for so long before wanting to go to a beach to lay out in the sun) and because my buds deserve to be seen by a bigger audience.
I guess that makes me an amateur sell-out.
I'm OK with that.
"'My Country Right or Wrong'is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober,'" -- Chesterton
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