Plot Summary
A crowd in a football stadium holds up posters to display a Budweiser and an empty pint glass.
The crowd then appears to flip their posters in a choreographed manner to show beer going from
the Budweiser around the stadium, and into the pint glass. It ends with the beer in the pint glass
disappearing as if it was being drank. The crowd then lets out a sigh of satisfaction.
The Effect:
The commercial cuts between an up close view of a section of the crowd holding posters, and an overhead view of a football stadium
in which you can see the pattern made by the posters of the fans.The fans then flip their posters to make an animation of a beer
glass being filled from a beer bottle.
How We Think it Was Done
There are a few different ways that we thought this could be done.
1) The first being they could have hired 97,000 extras,
created as many different posters, rented an air blimp and a football stadium. Then they could have choreographed the
entire sequence, and hoped to get it right.
2) Shoot a small portion of the stadium with real people using posters created. Build a model of a stadium that they were
to use. Then use a crowd generation program to fill out the stadium. Have the crowd hold up the different patterns needed
to make the effect, and then go in manually and change which pattern each part the stadium was holding up, frame by frame.
How it was actually done
The commercial was done by a production company called Method Studios. 300 extras were used to film the close ups of the
crowd. The shoot took two days. Method Studios then used a program called Massive Prime, which is made by Massive Software.
They modified the program to their particular needs. Massive Prime allowed Method Studios to create 97,000 virtual characters
that acted like a person in a stadium would. The characters were "ready-to-run" with Massive's Prime software. They used the
characters to flip the posters to form the designs that make up the effect. We are positive, but we are assuming that a 3D model
was created of the stadium, and then the virtual characters were added to it.
Alternate Ways of Doing the Effect Describe ways that the effect could have been better/more simply done using current technology.
One obvious alternative to using software to digitally generate a crowd is to have a whole football stadium full of people. Considering
how cost prohibitive this is, as well as the extremely amount of coordination that would be required to get 97,000 actors to work in unison,
this is not a viable alternative.
Considering that this clip was created in 2006 and used relatively new software at that time, we don't know that much could be done to
improve on the quality.
How This Applies to Our Project
We have discussed adding in a crowd to our stadium so it appears to have a more realistic football feel. So doing this commercial
for our critique gave us an idea of one way crowds could be generated. The problem with generating a crowd this way for us is that
we will not have a 3D model of Bobby Dodd Stadium, but instead a panorama of it. Never the less, it gave us an insight to one way of
creating crowds.
