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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
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.
"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.
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!
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.
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.
So actually you were so good, they included you in the same scene 30 times! Do they increase your daily rate for the duplication?
http://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.
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.
What self-respecting author writes in MS Word? It's all about FrameMaker baby.
Were that I say, pancakes?
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