Effect: Theater matte shot for Se Habla Español
Director: Gabriel Del Rio
Problem: The plot of the movie hinges on the fact that the lead character has stage fright. At the end of the movie he is forced onto stage in front of a large audience at a film festival.
Just the Facts: I happened to be visiting the set the day they were shooting the stage fright scenes in a medium sized theater in Washington D.C. and despite having invited over a hundred people to come and be extras, the production only ended up with about 20 people and that included the crew. Key grip Joe O'Ferrell who I had done some visual FX work for on his first movie Franky's Heaven suggested to Gabriel that we might be able to clone the audience.
How it was done: I was invited to direct the visual effect. The first thing we did was to lock down the camera (which was on a tripod on the stage facing the audience). It is always easier and much, much cheaper to do Visual FX when the camera has been locked down, and by locked down I mean, it doesn't move, doesn't pan, doesn't zoom, doesn't dolly, doesn't get refocused, it needs to stay perfectly, absolutely still. Even the slightest jiggle could add hours to the effect production. I am always surprised when I tell directors and cameramen that, and they still move the camera. "I didn't think you meant I couldn't move it this way..." Once you move that camera you have added several hundred percent to the cost of the shot.
With the Canon XL 1 camera locked down and recording we moved the extras from one group of seats to another, being careful to redistribute the audience and try and change the appearance of extras who stood out from the crowd. Sometimes we had them put on a jacket, a hat or a sweater, trade with a neighbor, whatever we could think of. If you look at the stills long enough you can pick out the duplicates (after all we only had twenty people trying to like like two hundred). But in the context of the 10 second shot in the darkened theater it was not noticeable. We also did the shot with the house lights on as it is easier to darken the scene in post and there were times in the movie that the lights were on, were going off, and when a projector was running. All of that was done in post. Another thing to be careful of is to not put two people in the same place at the same time. and to make sure you fill in all the empty seats. That can actually get kind of complicated because with everyone moving around you lose track of where people just were. I had drawn a quick grid of the theater that I was using to keep track and it worked even though we were winging it. A digital camera would have been helpful as a reference. We obviously did not want to touch the Video camera .
