From the course: Pro Video Tips

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Making crowds look more crowded

Making crowds look more crowded

From the course: Pro Video Tips

Making crowds look more crowded

- The last technique for manipulating size I want to discuss this week is, perhaps, the most practical and that's how to make a crowd of a few people look like a lot of people. Of course in Hollywood they can fill in an empty stadium with a roaring capacity crowd entirely through digital effects. If you have the resources, tools and skills to do that, I say go for it. However, on the Indie level, we still got a few good old-fashioned optical tricks up our sleeve to help make our smaller crowds of extras and people look more dense. While we can't exactly make an empty stadium or room look full, we can still frame and shoot things in a way that helps conceal how few people were actually at that location. The trick here is to use a telephoto lens which can help emphasize and exaggerate the size of the crowd even if it's not really that crowded. A telephoto lens visually compresses any mass of people so that even if they are 10 feet apart, it appears to the lens that they are right up on…

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