Crowd Pleasers: How Zoic Studios Mastered the Art of Lifelike Digital Audiences- LBB
LBB’s April Summers speaks to VFX supervisor and creative director, Rocco Passionino, about creating the illusion of realistic crowds for Emmy-nominated Daisy Jones & The Six
Have you noticed how 2023's most popular TV shows like Ted Lasso and Daisy Jones & The Six are using digital replication to simulate hyper-realistic crowd scenes? No? Well that’s because the technology in the hands of this industry’s most skilled VFX artists has reached new heights, resulting in unthinkable on-screen wizardry.
According to Insider, the largest on-screen crowd scene ever shot was for the 1982 film, Gandhi. Filmed in India, the iconic funeral procession scene reportedly featured 300,000 extras. While this has gone down in movie history as a record breaking effort, crowd scenes far smaller than this filmmaking feat can prove problematic to direct. On top of the coordination of hundreds of extras, the additional expense makes real life crowd scenes an unappealing prospect for studios.
Luckily, the visual effects artists toiling away behind the scenes, have found an ideal sweet spot - both in terms of budget and practicality - with the most realistic payoff. The best solution for filmmakers in 2023 is using a combination of real people and computer-generated avatars. By filming a small group of real people - also known as plate extras - acting out a wide range of movements in front of a green screen, VFX artists can digitally replicate them en masse to fit the requirements of a specific crowd scene.
Eager to unearth the craft behind this increasingly in-demand area of VFX, LBB’s April Summers speaks to Rocco Passionino about conjuring computer-generated crowds for Emmy-nominated musical drama, Daisy Jones & The Six.
LBB> How did the digital craft of this project differ from other crowd scenes you have worked on?
Rocco> Every crowd I’ve ever created has been a unique experience. Frustratingly, it’s very rare for us to be able to lift a toolset from one project and drop it into another – there is always a twist. The size of the crowds and the time period definitely made Daisy Jones & The Six different from other shows we have worked on.
As the series progresses, the band’s popularity leads to them performing at larger and larger venues, culminating with their final performance at Chicago’s Soldier Field Stadium. For this, we had to fill up the entirety of a 1970’s replica (Soldier Field was remodelled in 2002) of the 50,000 seat stadium with a digital crowd - in period clothing - matching to the performance of the foreground live action extras in the scene. Almost every shot in the series had a live action extras component to it which challenged us to make our crowd match in look, feel, and action to the real people in the scene.
LBB> Can you tell us about the creative process of crafting large crowd shots? What technology is used and how does it lend itself to the creative process?
Rocco> At the beginning of this show we did a deep dive into what exactly concert footage from the 70s looked like. Surprisingly, outside of clothing, average age, and the use of lighters, what the crowd itself was doing was very similar to today: lots of people standing around listening to music. We then looked into the locations the band were playing and made stand-in proxy’s for the venues. In the case of Soldier Stadium, it had been remodelled in 2002 so that meant we had to reference what the location looked like back then, rebuilding it from those specifications.
In terms of technology, the backbone of our crowd creation for this project was Houdini. All the population density, animation, performance swapping, simulation, variety and randomization, and wardrobe selection happened in Houdini. We developed a library of crowd animations for all the characters that allowed them to walk, cheer, wave, dance, and other typical behaviours needed to fill out the crowd.
Read more now at: LBB-Crowd Pleasers
