A common mistake among film makers is the lack of extras in a scene, because its hard to get a large amount of people in a scene without a big budget or a lot of friends. But don't be in doubt you can always fake out the viewer! The first way is to group your extras together instead of spreading them apart, it will look more natural as people group together when they interact. Second, shoot with a long lens, it adds more depth and gives an illusion of more people being in the shot that there actually are. Third is to create a parallax effect by having people walk through the scene, crowded places are not still, so adding people moving on different planes of the shot makes it seem more lively.Fourth taking multiple shots and masking them onto one shot is a way of doing it with VFX. Lastly get close shots of your extras, it shows there are more people there than the main characters.
I didn't know there were so many different ways to add more characters to a scene without actually gathering no more that a few people. I think this will be super useful next year when I am working on my project, I would definitely want some populated scenes. It seems that lots of TV shows use this technique for crowded bars,where they put pockets of people behind the character. I hope these techniques drives indie films to have more crowded scenes, because often indie films seem awfully vacant.
Nice incite Jack
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