Tested: Movies are getting bigger. It's a trend that a lot of people complain about. "Too much spectacle!" they grumble. "Too many battle scenes!" they protest. Once the nay-sayers have started, it probably won't be long before they trot out that tiresome 21st century pejorative: "Too much CG!" Well, I've got news for you. Hollywood's obsession with size is nothing new. Ever since the dawn of cinema, filmmakers have been falling over themselves to put as much clutter on the screen as is humanly possible.
3 comments:
The computer program Massive is truly incredible. It’s amazing and a bit intimidating how much a computer simulation can think and act on its own, behaving nearly as unpredictably, if not more, than a human actor. The example given for the use of Massive was one of orcs and elves, one that already would require the use of computer integration. I wonder how often Massive gets used when the crowds are full of strictly human characters. Is Massive also used in conjunction with live aerial shots or is the entire scene crafted of computer code? Is there even truly a need for crowds to be so large? Humans have a hard time perceiving the differences between large numbers and distinguishing the differences; have there been experiments conducted for determining what amount of individuals are actually needed to portray the sense of number that the directors are searching for or has the race to do the most disregarded the search for happy medium?
Honestly, I can’t get past trying to wrap my head around the logistics of 300,000 people in a call. How would they all park? How much is spent on costuming all of them? I can’t even picture 300,000 people. That is 23 times the entire student body of CMU. Would there just be one sound system giving instructions. How would you get them all to be quiet. Don’t get me wrong, I’m impressed by the technology, but the technology doesn’t surprise me given where we are at when it comes to CGI. I’m just surprised that having an actual 300,000 person crowd ever happened. I feel like there must have been some camera trick or editing technique or having the same people loop back through the frame again that would have always been easier than dealing with 300,000 people. I really would like to see how that situation was managed.
Shows—movies, TV, plays or operas—that require a large crowd can be absolutely complicated. Reading about the early days of filmed crowd creation was really interesting. The fact that they essentially hired entire towns to be movies to fill out the crowd is just stunning. The article mentions the crafts table, costumes, etc but it doesn’t discuss the complexity that arrives when you’re dealing a large war scene and you have a large amount of untrained people trying to “Battle.” I wonder how many injuries resulted from scenes like that. This is another moment where technology comes in to take care of things quite cleanly and nicely, but I do agree, at what point does the size of the crowd arms race end? And how does this arms race really affect live theater? There’s a lot of new works being produced right now that almost demand being staged in a way that keeps transitions down to such a refined minimum that it’s almost impossible without film editing. This makes sense as it’s very much what our audiences are used to. They want the immediacy of movies and tv. Hopefully they don’t start demanding the crowds too.
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