How Hollywood makes fake crowds look so real

• Hollywood productions often have to find creative ways to turn small groups into massive crowds.
• The "Ted Lasso" visual effects crew filled a 26,000-seat stadium using several methods.
• They filmed extras in front of a green screen, duplicated people on set, and created extras from CGI.

Following is the transcript of the video.

Narrator: In the TV show "Ted Lasso," this 26,000-seat stadium is filled to the brim. But this shot -- it was created during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now, pause and zoom in here.

See this woman? She's not really here. In fact, she was shot on a completely different continent.

And this shot? The majority of these people aren't even real.

The "Ted Lasso" team pushed the boundaries on how they could safely fill out the stands. And knowing all the different ways these crowds were made could change the way we see large crowds in movies and TV forever.

The largest crowd scene ever shot was for the movie "Gandhi," which holds the Guinness World Record for most film extras, with this funeral procession, reportedly made up of 300,000 real marchers. But directing this many extras is expensive, not to mention a huge logistical challenge.

So movies have turned to using fake people, like this painted matte backdrop in 1959's "Ben-Hur" or these inflatable extras in 2006's "Glory Road," which are an easy way to give more real-life depth to a fake crowd in the distance.

But fake crowds also come with their own limitations. They can save the crew money and properly fill an arena, but they can't move or interact on their own like real people.

So the "Ted Lasso" team decided to use a combination of real and fake people to make their crowds look as realistic as possible.

Barnstorm VFX had two big problems to deal with. First, because of the pandemic, they couldn't fill the stands with as many real people as they normally would. Plus, they weren't permitted to film on the field at the real Selhurst Park Stadium, which the fictional Nelson Road Stadium is based on.

So, how did they get all these people to fill 26,000 seats?

They constructed an entire CG stadium and used a technique called plate extras.

Filming real people the crew can direct is best for capturing distinct gestures up close, like this moment in "Ted Lasso" where the fans lift their fingers and shout a very specific curse word at Ted.

Crowd: Wanker!

Coach Beard: Let's give it a shot.

Narrator: Plate extras are filmed in front of a green screen and then digitally scattered into the desired shots. The extras are filmed in an array of costumes while doing a wide range of movements.

Lawson Deming: Oftentimes a set of actions that sort of flows into one another, like cheers that flow into a boo, standing up, sitting down.

Narrator: A typical plate shoot might involve well over 100 extras, but because of lockdown rules, Barnstorm could only use around 20 people, members of its own team in Los Angeles. But social distancing didn't hurt the production.

Plate extras aren't filmed next to each other normally, but further apart than they would be in a real crowd. That way, they can be placed more easily in the final shot. These plate extras were also filmed from multiple angles.

Deming: We shot head-on, front 45, and then a full profile angle, because we knew that we weren't gonna see people from behind.

Narrator: In this scene, the majority of extras from this angle were actually on set, but this guy here? Another extra who was shot separately, because, according to Deming, the production team didn't like these two empty seats here.

Deming: So we did, like, the smallest crowd addition we've ever done. It was a high angle, so we couldn't just shoot someone head-on, on a green screen. I had to estimate the angle and say, oh, what lens do we think this was shot on? What do we think the camera height was? Get up on a ladder, shoot down, look at the shot, compare it.

Narrator: Still, Deming couldn't shoot as many plate extras as he had hoped, so they only made up a small portion of the crowd. And substituting in green-screened people is never as good as having people on set.

So when that's possible, a production might choose a technique called crowd tiling. Basically, the crew shoots one small group and physically moves them around the set. They're then combined together in postproduction.

This is how the "Ted Lasso" crew created part of the backdrop behind Jamie here.

You can also see an example of this technique in "Insecure," where Issa and her friends go to a concert in season three, episode five.

Take a look at this overhead shot of hundreds of concertgoers. In reality, there was a group of fewer than 200 extras on the field. In five separate shots, that group was placed in the left, right, center, and back of the venue and rotoscoped together into one shot.

Crowd tiling is key if you're dealing with varied lighting. As you can see in the finished shot, the crowds in the front, the middle, and the back are all being hit with different color lights. And a lot of work has to be done to hide the duplication.

Deming: Your eye is very good at catching duplication. When you're not careful about how you do crowd tiling, you can literally end up with the same people next to themselves.

Narrator: These tiles that formed this one shot from "Insecure" took an hour and a half total to shoot and end up on screen for only one second. And this technique really only works when you have stationary shots.

Deming: You only have that one angle. You can't move the camera during it. It literally just works for the one angle that you shot it from.

Narrator: For "Ted Lasso," the limited amount of real extras, both on set and in front of a green screen, left the crew with few head-on shots for tiling. So how did they manage to get the stands to look so full in shots like this?

Digital doubles -- a method that's less realistic up close but can be used to fill in gaps from a distance. Digital doubles made up an estimated 90% of the show's crowd shots.

The less detailed doubles came from a template, but productions can create more detailed ones by scanning real actors, like Margot Robbie in "I, Tonya." This technique is the most versatile of them all. Doubles can be relit and shot from any angle. Plus, you can make more unique characters.

Deming knew the "Ted Lasso" games were largely shot in the evening. This meant dressing the doubles for cold weather in CG scarfs, hats, and jackets.

Deming: Because they're completely CGI characters, we can control everything about their appearance.

Narrator: Unlike matte extras and inflatable dummies, you can also make digital doubles move and react to the action in the scene. In "Ted Lasso," different sections of the crowd sometimes needed to have two reactions at once, since two teams would be playing each other.

So they used a crowd-simulator software called Golaem. Here, the software is identifying 90% of the available seats in this section of the stadium, filling it with angry front-facing fans dressed in the home team's colors.

The same programming that allows us to assign them a particular color shirt, for example, also allows us to assign them a particular reaction.

Narrator: During this shot, where AFC Richmond scores a goal, any digital double wearing the red and blue of that team was programmed to cheer.

Deming: Because we have this control, the entire crowd simulation essentially knows. We can categorize them as being on this side.

Narrator: It still needs to feel like a real human movement, as opposed to a faked movement. So Barnstorm's animators donned motion-capture suits and fed every movement to the software.

And the hardest action? Clapping. Two CG hands going in for a clap will naturally want to intersect with one another, and the suit alone couldn't capture everything.

Deming: Oftentimes you'll end up in this situation where, just imagine trying to clap without moving your wrists and without moving your fingers. You end up with people doing this sort of like, a seal, you know, like the seal clapping for their food.

Narrator: So the animators also wore separate mo-cap gloves, a relatively recent innovation in the industry, to perfect the complex hand movements.

The key to faking a realistic crowd like they did in "Ted Lasso" is to combine these techniques into a cohesive whole.

Deming: I think my preferred method of creating a crowd is anything that works. You're not restricting yourself to one method, so the audience is never gonna quite catch on, even if they think they know what you're doing.

Animator: Oh, my God! That's a soccer ball in a goal! I'm so fricking excited! Yes!