Energy & crowd scenes

Ever since the development of MASSIVE and other software, virtual crowds have become a staple of big budget films from Episode II to Troy to LOTR. But what is curious is to me is the unimpressiveness of these scenes. What ought to be spellbinding is surprisingly dull. On the other hand, I find the battle scene in Spartacus compelling. The reason for this is not that the throngs in Spartacus are "real" while the others are CGI. As I mentioned earlier, the problem is typically one of performance, not technology. Therefore, I suspect that CGI scenes are somehow performed incorrectly. I also do not think it has to do with the way the sequence is framed by its narrative.

Think about the the battle scene in Spartacus. The army looks like a huge patchwork and moves as an undifferentiated mass. The sequence seems to take forever. In Episode II, Troy and LOTR, on the other hand, the warriors seem distinct and discrete having no visual weight. They move quickly. Often, they look like toys. Perhaps the problem comes from the nature of the algorithms used. If I remember correctly, MASSIVE uses simple rule-based AI to guide each digital extra. I wonder if this is an incorrect conceptualization of a crowd. Perhaps crowds are led by a kind of group-think instead of individual behaviors. Perhaps changes ripple through the crowd more slowly than we see in contemporary efforts. Or perhaps it has something to do with direction and acting. What makes the Spartacus scenes so riveting is the feeling that there are thousands of individuals holding together yet ready to burst into action. In LOTR on the other hand, the battles look like people marching or yelling and waving their hands around, the visual equivalent of a walla group. Scenes that should be sizzling with the energy of thousands of people seem to be hollow spectacle.

In the contemporary films, the directors want to keep everything on the move. They do not trust stillness or anticipation. Maybe where the performances of the CGI characters fail is not in action, but in performing readiness. The CGI crowd knows only action or motionlessness. Kubrick's crowd was neither; it was comparatively still, but with the anticipation of action.