Crowd Creation On Time and In Budget

Filling the Bleachers on She's the Man

How do you fill a stadium with 3500 people — while letting the director shoot with a moving camera, from any angle — without busting a low budget? That was the question put to Vancouver visual effects studio Rainmaker, by Andy Finkman, director of DreamWorks Pictures and Lakeshore Entertainment’s She’s the Man. In the film, the star, Amanda Bynes, a soccer player, is on the football pitch performing in the big game.

“Andy wanted to do something big,” says Mark Breakspear, visual effects supervisor. “The crowd was an integral part of the performance.”

Finkman had rejected the tried and true method of duplicating crowds by stitching together film of 300 extras moved in blocks around the stadium. That method required a fixed camera. “He would have had to cut from people running around on the pitch to a boring, locked off shot,” says Breakspear. “And creating a CG crowd would have been prohibitively expensive, especially with people clapping and cheering.”

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