C is for Crowd Control

Crowds and numbers of elements when shot on film, 

be it the can or within a render farm, 

have to be controlled. 

This post looks at some of the 

more populated films and the

techniques needed to wrangle the

crowds.

The AMC Filmsite 

has recorded the numbers

within crowds for the earlier films

on their blog post here.  

Cecil B. De Mille's silent "The Ten Commandments" (1923) 

included a crowd scene with over 3,500 extras. 

(Youtube.com) 

Friz Lang's Metropolis from 1927

included 38,000 people. 

(Youtube.com)

Look at the title scene of 101 Dalmatians

for managing 

and animating the dots. 

Xerography certainly helped the process, 

despite Walt Disney allegedly stating that 

he disliked "the rough drawing style

brought about by the Xerography process". (IMDB)

(YouTube.com)

The dots have been counted - 6,469,952 dots in the whole film.


In 1994, an original story partially based on a Shakespeare play
gave the public The Lion King.
Within this film, the alpha lion Mufasa
has to be eliminated by the usurper Scar.
What better way to do this in Africa than
with a wildebeest stampede.

Source

IMDB.com states "The wildebeest stampeded took Disney's CG department approximately three years to animate. A new computer program had to be written for the CG wildebeest stampede that allowed hundreds of computer generated animals to run but without colliding into each other." The coloured wildebeest denote the characters with certain movements or behavioural traits. 

(Youtube.com)

In 1996, another Disney film, 

The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 

used crowd simulation for a scene 

where we see the crowds in the square below

during the song The Bells of Notre Dame.

 

(Around the 3.55 minute mark, the crowd appears - YouTube.com)

This should give you enough to get on with, but I shall be adding to this blog post with the use of the crowd simulator from Weta Digital. Happy Easter, oops, this dates the blog post.