A crowd is hard to film. A bigger crowd is hard to pay for. So you film a small one and multiply it.

For this Tim Hortons spot, we did the rotoscopy for the crowd duplication. Every person had to be cut out cleanly before they could be copied.

The second problem was the camera. The crowd was close to the lens in a lot of the shots. That makes match-moving harder to solve. Most of the shots ended up being hand tracks.

A hand track means an artist places the track frame by frame, because the software cannot solve it alone. It takes longer. It also holds up better when automatic tracking fails.

Crowd duplication is not new. ILM multiplied the crowd at the Reflecting Pool in Forrest Gump. We wrote about how that film was made: How ILM put Tom Hanks into the news.

Need a crowd multiplied? See our work or get in touch.