Solutions to create crowd for Animation
It is very interesting to see the techniques in which lots of animation and film-makers manipulate crowds in their work. The approach that film-makers take generally depends on factors such as time & budget, and resources available.
Big budget projects or feature films made by studios such as Disney and Pixar, tend to have very detailed ambience characters (Which they might have a storage of....maybe characters which they can reuse as crowd in a lot of different projects, but regardless they are all well detailed, a lot of them have motion too!)
Disney's crowd / audience in "Wish" (2023) and "Hercules" (1997)
Its clearly the ideal way to simulate crowds and make the world look much more believable and engaging as like the real world, there is a unique face with unique features and also vaguely unique body languages. However this kind of approach seems to have a real big crew working alongside you or people who can dedicatedly take care of the crowd part as the sequence doesn't so much to the story when compared to the effort it takes to create it.
On the other hand there is an extremely cost efficient as well as time efficient way that people tend to use (which i personally am not very fond of), but the result is as unrealistic and boring as it can get. In this way of doing things, people tend to replicate one anonymous character into x number of times to create their crowd in the shot. A lot of the times, they also follow the same fed set of motion at the same time which makes it really artificial.
Something like this could be an example. It makes everyone look like a clone and for me that is an instant distraction and it catches my eye because it looks lazy and less passionate. it does have its applications though, when it comes to game design, for instance a sports game. We don't need to care about the audience and its usually a long shot where u cant see the details anyway.
However for me, if I'm working alone on a personal project I found that the best option would be an in-between but with an added layer of creativity. I find myself liking the approach of how Anime and Independent Shortfilms approach this.
Crowds in Anime
The solution used, is to show them in the light of the main character which also adds to the story (as the story tend to usually in one or more ways revolve around the main character). By either reducing the details, of the crowd or making them less vibrant or sometimes even both, depending on the context.
Examples of using roughs for crowd in Anime in a funny sequence
The more light hearted the shot, the more you can get away with make it rather rough because we aren't trying to hide the fact that it would be too much to do, infact on the contrary, accepting it as well as presenting it with grace. And since the context is funny, people accept it without any critics and might even have a laugh about it.
My short-film plot is about fear as the main emotion and so i feel showing the crowd through the eyes of my lead (Making them less saturated and less detailed) will also leave an impact and also establish the fact that for her, everyone else is just another face in her life (Unless its someone close to her) and will also help support her introvertish nature further.
