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Filming an Invasion Without Extras 185

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.'"
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Filming an Invasion Without Extras

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  • by croddy ( 659025 ) * on Monday January 14, 2008 @02:36PM (#22038890)
    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.
    • by damburger ( 981828 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @02:52PM (#22039110)

      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.

      • by OECD ( 639690 )

        It can only do our stagnant societies good to make some cheaper megaphones.

        Unfortunately, just as the megaphones get cheaper, the big guys claim a patent on megaphones, copyright all forms of expression, and sue critics for "trademark dilution."

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          And, much as we ignored edicts from the church prohibiting heretical publications, we will continue to ignore such attempts at stifling us.
      • by j-cloth ( 862412 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @05:36PM (#22042236)
        It can only do our stagnant societies good to make some cheaper megaphones.

        Try reading slashdot with all comments visible and see if your statement needs any modifications.
    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Lumpmoose ( 697966 )
      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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
      • Yeah, he got 30,000 rugby fans to chant. That's really hard.

        Go to any well-attended footie game in England, even if it's something like Stevenage versus York City (for our American audience, that's like going to a Triple-A game as far as attendance goes).

        Just have a few of you start singing something funny, relevant to the match you're watching (making sure there's a snippet of what you want to use for your sound effect). Within twenty minutes, hundreds will be singing it. Make sure you have half a dozen pe
        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Thansal ( 999464 )
          I think you missed the point.

          We can make a rather convincing Omaha Beech video with only 3 actors.
          And we can make the LotR battles with only a few hundred.

          But we still needed 30K loud cricket fans to create the SOUND of a pitched battle.
          Can we do it with 3?
        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Dutch Gun ( 899105 )
          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.
        • Go to any well-attended footie game in England ..... recording the chant

          and then get sued by Rupert Murdoch for taking recording equipment to a game :-)

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by russellh ( 547685 )

        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.
        • 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
      • He did that because he could and because he wanted to, not because he had to. Probably a bit of publicity and national pride, too. Not to mention that you just guaranteed 30,000 people are going to pay to go see the movie just for bragging rights.
    • by wumingzi ( 67100 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @04:19PM (#22040844) Homepage Journal
      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.
      • Wha, you wan' distribution? I got yer distribution right here! See, it's a big fucking tube. Actually, there's a series of lots of big motherfuckin tubes, and you can send information through them. How's that for a distribution network?
      • by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @05:44PM (#22042416)

        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
      • by nguy ( 1207026 )
        the cost of distributing the film often costs as much as making the film did

        Internet distribution and cheap large screen TVs seem to be solving that problem. It can be as much fun to have a bunch of friends over for a movie as it is to go out to the movies.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      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 lo
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by AeroIllini ( 726211 )
        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?!

        Ma
        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by kionel ( 600472 )
          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 [google.com].

          Was it
    • 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

      I don't think you understand the situation. This kind of technology doesn't threaten copyrights. Piracy threatens copyrights, and that's what the entertainment industry is "clinging onto". What this is is a more efficient method of producing movies (well, just the crowd scenes), which threatens them in a different, legitimate, competition-i

  • oh noez! (Score:5, Funny)

    by that IT girl ( 864406 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @02:41PM (#22038986) Journal
    While that is cool technology, it also means my chance of ever being in a movie just dropped from "extremely slim" to "Nicole Richie". :(
    • by Finallyjoined!!! ( 1158431 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @02:51PM (#22039100)
      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.
      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Albanach ( 527650 )
        So actually you were so good, they included you in the same scene 30 times! Do they increase your daily rate for the duplication?
        • So actually you were so good, they included you in the same scene 30 times! Do they increase your daily rate for the duplication?
          Nope. As an extra you're just paid by the day.
      • 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.
      • 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.
    • Re:oh noez! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by badasscat ( 563442 ) <basscadet75NO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Monday January 14, 2008 @03:11PM (#22039386)
      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.
       
      • 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
      • Whether filmmakers did it or not, the trick is that it's been done cheaper now, so that non-studios can do it.
      • They've been doing crowd-doubling since the forties, if not earlier, only it was done using compositing and multiple exposure, not CG.
    • What this means is that movies are going more "open source" than ever before. This also means that your chances of being in a movie have gone UP! Want to be in a movie? No problem, make your own!
      Want to be in a movie that tens of thousands, perhaps millions of people will actually _see_? Again, no problem, there seems to be a limitless demand for porn out there, just upload your film to a few carefully selected sites and P2P apps and away you go. Of course, no one will know your name or even care much about
      • 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.

        ria
  • Heh (Score:2, Insightful)

    Pretty soon the tech will be sufficiently advanced that filmakers won't actually need those really expensive actor chappies. Yay :-)
    • by hoggoth ( 414195 )
      > Pretty soon the tech will be sufficiently advanced that filmakers won't actually need those really expensive actor chappies. Yay :-)

      Anyone who's seen 'I Am Legend' knows how far that is from happening.
      It was Will Smith vs. a bunch of CGI characters popping around the screen like video game sprites.
      When they yelled, their faces distorted beyond physical possibility; When they jumped they went from place A to place B on the screen without much concern for how far apart those places were supposed to be in
    • Pretty soon the tech will be sufficiently advanced that filmakers won't actually need those really expensive actor chappies. Yay :-)

      Actors bring more than their physical presence to the movies they appear in. Computer-generated crowds are one thing; if you want to communicate a message to your viewer, you still need someone with the talent to do so.

      As for the "expensive" ones, if they movies they appear in bring in large sums of money, the creative people involved in making it deserve significant portion of

      • As for the "expensive" ones, if they movies they appear in bring in large sums of money, the creative people involved in making it deserve significant portion of that.

        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 w

  • old adage (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SoupGuru ( 723634 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @02:43PM (#22039014)
    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 (Score:4, Insightful)

      by wizardforce ( 1005805 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @03:23PM (#22039588) Journal

      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.
      • by Lumpy ( 12016 )
        Hollywood plots "seem" better because they can afford to buy the rights to a movie made a few years ago and remake it.

        There hasn't been a original movie out of Hollywood in decades. The Indie film makers on the other hand, they have.

        Good god people we are about to see "RAMBO" remade and in the theaters again... It's only a few months away from the announcement that Star wars is going to remake the original 3 films. ET remake, etc.... Hollywood cant do ANYTHING original.
    • But Hollywood has *already* lost sight of plot and character. Why do you think most of us see this move toward amateur film making as a good thing?
    • 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.

      You mean... like Hollywood?

      Projects such as this should serve to make it clear to everyone: making a movie is easy. Telling a story is, and always has been, hard.
  • by alta ( 1263 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @02:44PM (#22039020) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • by shmlco ( 594907 )
      "The same gear needed to make a good website ... "

      I can use iWeb to make a web site, GarageBand to make a music CD, PageMaker to do a brochure, or Final Cut to make a movie.

      But whether or not ANY of them are "good" in any way, shape or form is another matter entirely. Skill, talent, and training still count after all.

      In fact, as the tools advance technically to the point where "anyone" can use them, such things are needed even more. Remember Sturgeon's law.
      • Skill, talent, and training still count after all.

        Sure, just like anyone can write a blog, but if you have nothing interesting to say nobody is going to read it.

        All of this tech that is available to average Joe's simply means that the "gatekeepers" in Hollyweird no longer get to decide who gets an audience, or what that audience gets to see. For a fairly modest amount of money, anyone get buy a camera and some editing software and produce a technically acceptable film. If you are inclined to do so, you coul

      • by flewp ( 458359 )
        Along the same lines of needing skill, talent, etc:

        I'm a modeler and texture artist. I would never dream of being able to recreate LOTR quality effects on my own - I'd need animators, compositing artists, etc. It's pretty hard for an amateur to put together, and manage a team of highly skilled artists. This is where the studios have the advantage - they can hire and manage specialists in each field.
    • 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 $32
    • by Zakabog ( 603757 )
      Ummm... what are you talking about? Is this a joke? Judging from your UID you should know that a decade ago the internet was full of lousy amateur web sites hosted on geocities, yahoo, AOL, or any number of free hosting places that would host your site absolutely free (now these people have myspace and think they're web developers because they found a script that makes it rain matrix code on their page). Then there were places that would give you free domain names (netzero, cjb, dydns.) I was on a small
  • Amateurs: (Score:4, Insightful)

    by CaptainPatent ( 1087643 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @02:46PM (#22039036) Journal
    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.)
  • convergence (Score:3, Funny)

    by Reader X ( 906979 ) <readerx@gmailCOLA.com minus caffeine> on Monday January 14, 2008 @02:46PM (#22039038)
    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!
  • Overly optimistic (Score:3, Insightful)

    by eln ( 21727 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @02:46PM (#22039042)

    '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.
    • by Goaway ( 82658 )
      They are talking about cameras and such. Try to get past the nerd tunnel vision.
    • No doubt. It's like anything else - Video games, etc. We have the tools to make our own Video games, and our own movies with CGI effects that rival hollywood studios. It might take a little longer to render, but it can be done. But can it be?

      Just because I have all the software to make great CGI at home, doesn't mean I'm suddenly a 3D modeler and animation artist. Just because I have High Definition video equipment doesn't mean I can write a good script.
    • by Kjella ( 173770 )
      I think that's a declining return on investment. I mean, a lot of the time it's just about suspending reality and you're there. If you fall out of it by thinking "geez, that looks like a guy in a rubber suit" or "oh man, that model looked fake" or "what the hell kind of explosion was that? firecracker?" then you've failed. Otherwise you've succeeded. Sure, I can think of special effects movies that won't be that way but then the special effects are a central part of the theme. All the other movies that happ
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jollyreaper ( 513215 )

      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.

      True. Babylon 5 was able to pull off scenes with CGI that would have been impossible for models, scenes that were on a level of complexity similar to Return of the Jedi which was the gold standard for jaw-dropping space action. Granted, the CGI models did not look as good as the ROTJ practical models but this is a mid-budget TV show versus Star Wars! You could not have expected this. And now we have fan films like Star Wreck able to mimic the B5 look quite faithfully, the space shots looking just as good e

  • And now... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @02:53PM (#22039122)
    ...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
    • 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.

      i disagree, i still don't think i've seen a CGI depiction of a human that is that close to real life quality. Beowulf 3D was pretty amazing, but not nearly there. movies like the Matrix and Star Wars series had pretty amazing effects, but they're far better at making non-human characters or objects seem real than they are at depicting animated humans. there's just something to the way that humans move that our brain can easily recognize as right or not-right, and they haven't been able to overcome that.

      • by eebra82 ( 907996 )
        You're kind of missing my point here. I'm saying that we can already make things look truly realistic as in picture by picture. The reason we haven't created a movie with true real life feeling on (for example) animated humans is because it is insanely difficult to attempt it and therefore also not worth the sacrifice. As a 3D artist, I have seen attempts to create a realistic human being and it was really close. The difficulty lies not in technology, but rather time consumption.

        As for Beowulf, they neve
  • 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 hologr
  • Not needed! (Score:3, Funny)

    by jbarr ( 2233 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @03:15PM (#22039442) Homepage
    "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?
  • Too bad... (Score:5, Funny)

    by J0nne ( 924579 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @03:15PM (#22039452)
    ...they didn't use this technique to generate huge crowds of servers.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 14, 2008 @03:16PM (#22039456)
    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.
  • It is also decreasing the value of video and photos as evidence in court cases.

    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.

    • I'd argue that reducing reliability of photo/video evidence is a very good thing.

      It's clear now that we can manipulate a person into or out of a photo with ease. There's no surprise that we can do it with video. Unless there's some way to independently authenticate the imagery, it should not be used as evidence.

      Police will have to rely on the old standbys - confessions, physical evidence, eyewitness accounts and all that.
  • by gEvil (beta) ( 945888 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @03:20PM (#22039542)
    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!
  • I'm glad the quality has improved so much. Thanks Technology! It's clear that's been the vital missing element in film making.
  • 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.
  • by nasor ( 690345 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @03:40PM (#22039934)
    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.
    • 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?

      I had jury duty and that question came up with some drugs found. The whole thing revolves proving a chain of custody. Is the substance collected at the site the same substance presented in the case? Who had it? Who secured it? A hard drive from a hardware time-lapse camera system is more credible
  • Wow! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Quiet_Desperation ( 858215 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @03:45PM (#22040048)
    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.
    • Invasions that involve hardly anyone at all?

      Too bad we can't do that in real life.

      I think Switzerland [guardian.co.uk] intended to procure an invasion with hardly anyone at all, reinforced by CGI soldiers, but I hear it didn't turn out so well.

  • 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.
  • by jfengel ( 409917 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @03:53PM (#22040222) Homepage Journal
    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 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.
  • by ducomputergeek ( 595742 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @04:34PM (#22041138)
    I still do most of my Pro work in Lightwave, but I've been following blender's development the past 10 years and it's an impressive piece of software. Something else I've been following has been Blender People, kind of a poor man's Massive. (Massive is the AI engine used in LoTR's for the battle scenes and is about $20k per seat the last time I checked)

    http://www.harkyman.com/bp.html [harkyman.com]

    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.

  • 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-15700 [slashdot.org]http://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.
  • 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 t
  • 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
  • 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.
    • Wow, that sucks. I always thought being an extra would be kind of a lark, but you make it sound pretty petty and sometimes grueling. Is there no one just "vacationing" as an extra?
  • 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 wor
    • Hollywood knows perfectly well how to make a good movie.

      My thinking is that for the most part, the film industry is allowed to screw around making whatever junk it wants, with many of its workers (from the key grip to the production heads) believing that they really are doing what they can with the philosophies they personally generate. But if the top dogs decide that it is time for society to jump in a specific direction, then there are ways to ensure that the message is effective and powerful and respect
  • What self-respecting author writes in MS Word? It's all about FrameMaker baby.
  • Yeah... four days.. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by snicho99 ( 984884 )
    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 t
  • '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.'
    That's why movie production will not stop because of file sharing.

    The same technology that makes the product available for free, makes it so cheap to produce that amateurs are able to do it.

Technology is dominated by those who manage what they do not understand.

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