I enjoyed the Queen movie a lot, but I can’t figure out how they shot the final scene.
Without giving too much away it involves Queen playing a large concert in London in front of 72,000 people. According to Wikipedia “An exact replica of the 1985 Live Aid set at Wembley Stadium was created and brought to Bovingdon Airfield near Hemel Hempstead, where it was set up for rehearsals on 7 September 2017, with extras on set.” The reference article shows how they built the stage to replicate the one used during the original concert. I get how they did that, but how did they replicate the crowd?
When they are shooting behind the band out into the crowd it appears there are 72,000 real people. Was this all done with green screen and CGI? Has CGI advanced to the stage that it looks exactly like real people moving and singing? Perhaps they used a few thousand extras and just multiplied the effect, but you would be able to tell if they did that. So how did they pull it off?
Short answer, yes, CGI is that advanced. There are numerous techniques, from replicating actual shots of smaller crowds, to a few people with many dummies interspersed, to complete CGI.
Wow. Thanks everyone for the links. I’m very impressed by the realism of that crowd scene. I wondered whether they took low res footage shot during the actual Live Aid concert and somehow bumped up the resolution, but CGi makes a lot more sense. Well done filmmakers! I was completely fooled.
I remember watching some special effects clip from the *Young Indiana Jones Chronicles *and it showed how George Lucas was working on pioneering these CGI techniques with that show. The video showed a group of men on horses filmed in different angles that were then overlayed into the video to make it look like Young Indy was surrounded. I can’t find anything about this on Google but it may be out there to see.
In 1988 (before the CGI crowds were feasible), when the movie Major League was being filmed, the producers used Milwaukee County Stadium as a stand-in for Cleveland Stadium. They issued casting calls for extras (via newspaper ads) to come to the stadium to serve as the crowd for game scenes. IIRC, they got thousands to show up, but nowhere near the tens of thousands they would have needed to come close to filling the stadium. So, as I understand it, during they moved the extras around from section to section of the stadium, depending on the particular shot being done.
a friend told me they did the same thing filming Bull Durham in Durham in 1987. They moved people around as needed depending on where the cameras were.
They also used cardboard people. Saw an interview with a guy who ran the business that supplied them, and he was lamenting how computers were going to put him out of business.
I actually saw Bohemian Rhapsody this past weekend- excellent film.
Anyway, the crowds were definitely CGI in some shots- while they were exciting and well done, they were still kind of wrong- like they deliberately soft-focused the crowd / played with the depth of field in a way that didn’t look like what most crowd shots look like- fully in focus crowd shots (i.e. long f stop), but still indistinct because of the recording media and perceived size of the people in the back. In other words, the tiny looking people in the back were in focus, but still hard to make out because they were tiny and recorded on video. These had something else going on- like they deliberately blurred or fogged at certain distances.
Still, it didn’t take away from the movie at all- it was just something I noticed because I thought “Oh, that shot has to be CGI.” and then paid attention.
I observed a crowd scene being filmed in a high school football stadium for My All American. The crowd was redressed and moved from section to section of the stadium until the whole stadium was filled. Meanwhile, an actor (not the star of the movie) ran around on the field to give the crowd somewhere to look.
So did Fever Pitch. (Not at ND games, at Fenway Park)
I remember watching the end of the World Series and seeing Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon running onto the field. I wondered, WTF? Turns out they had permission from MLB to film the scene for the movie. Great film, they had to re-write it as the season progressed as the Red Sox were doing so well.
And also at Glastonbury. I haven’t seen the film, but I have seen clips when Bradley Cooper was being interviewed and some of his performances were filmed there
Bumping…
I watched Bohemian Rhapsody on DVD this past weekend (I didn’t see it in a theatre) and the compression for DVD resolution really made those shots look off to the point of being distracting. In the shots from the stage, you could clearly see the line where the real human extras ended and the digital crowds started. Everything behind a point just before the mixing stand looked like Minecraft. Same for the aerial shots of Wembley, which I understand were completely digital, given that Wembley has been renovated and no longer looks the way it did in 1985. The stationery building and stage looked great, but the crowd movement resulted in blocky artifacts. It would be interesting to see if it looks better or worse at different resolutions (Blu-ray,streaming - sounds like it looked good projected in a cinema).
Still an enjoyable, if somewhat inaccurate movie (it really didn’t need the utterly fictional contrived breakup-solo-reunion subplot to heighten the drama, and the chronological shuffling was distracting to someone who was in Jr. High/High School when they were at their peak in the US) and Rami Malek certainly deserved his Oscar.
