editing Crowd / Audience Scene

[Henry Spencer]

right, I have scene in my new text that has a cinema / theatre audience in it

Ideally, I would like to use the same person over and over again to fill each of the seats.

Practically, I was planning to leave the shot rolling while the actor moves from seat to seat, sitting in each position for about thirty seconds.

i will be editing in Adobe Premiere CS3. i've seen people cut certain parts of a shot out of the frame and layer an additional shot behind it. Would I be looking to use a similar process?


My knowledge of Premiere is sufficient enough to edit the film, but this is a little beyond my present skill level.

Is anyone able to point me in the direction of some details that may help me through?

I would much rather use the same person than organising a crowd. It'd look much better and be less hassle

 

[Anim8]

If I'm following what you are saying, you will need to comp all of the actor images in each seat. You need to do that in After Effects or similar. Doing that in Premiere maybe possible, but the aggravation involved wouldn't be worth it.

 

[knightly]

If you were to put a green screen behind your actor as they sit in each seat (no need in the back row) in turn, you could then pull a matte pretty easily (even premiere has the tools for this) and just have a billion layers... I would recommend doing a row, then exporting the film with the green intact, that way you can just layer the rows after wards which should simplify the process somewhat.

 

[CDCosta]

Why not just get a bunch of extras?

 

[Henry Spencer]

Why not just get a bunch of extras?

It does say in the first post that I would like the same person over and over again.

this is a stylistic and narrative choice; the film is intended to be in the surrealist / fantasy genre

I would like the protagonist to encounter an audience made up of himself

 

[knightly]

It'll take time, but the results will be cool.

 

[CDCosta]

ah ok, I see.

 

[Filman]

If you have Photoshop most of your crowd members could be just stills. Could work well if you want less work and if it's quite dark in the audience.

 

[knightly]

You could technically, fill the audience, then just copy the actor's face over each person shooting their face separately and having the actor act out each audience member's motions or reactions... or just get a variety of motions and put the appropriate ones over the people's faces in the audience (all dressed identically )...would also take time and cost more for costuming.

 

[indietalk]

Remember the Eminem video with all the Eminem clones? They were just people made up to look like him, wearing the same thing. You could definitely do this for a theater setting, theaters are dark, and each row back is less visible.