Crowd work on World War Z
Been a long while since I did a post… but here’s a little update with something I have extensively worked on at The Moving Picture Company in London: World War Z.
I was involved early on as a senior member of the MPC Crowd Team led by Marco Carboni that brought the zombie crowd shots of the Israel sequence to life. We started of doing a lot of crowd motion/look development and had to considerably push our proprietary ALICE crowd technology to achieve the more complex crowd shots that had dense masses of zombies swarming, climbing walls, crawling over eachother and physically interacting with eachother. It has been an exiting (sometimes exhausting;) ride prototyping and implementing new behaviours, systems and ragdoll simulations to achieve some interesting crowd work seen on the big screen 🙂 !
Here’s a fairly high-level look into some of the work we’ve done:
More info can be found in following articles:
http://www.fxguide.com/featured/zombie-warfare-world-war-z
http://www.awn.com/articles/visual-effects/the-zombification-of-world-war-z
http://www.moving-picture.com/showreels/making-of/the-making-of-world-war-z
Jo
Jo Plaete 
I’ve just seen it! I loved the ragdoll-like effect when the zombies jump head first with the arms along the body, haha! Sometimes they looked a bit like a fluid sim but the crowd looked really cool! I wished the storyline was on the same level. Here again, some Franziskaners could have helped. They’re the key to everything—but Sucker Punch—,I’m telling you!
Christopher Crouzet
August 7, 2014 at 10:23 pm
– If I could get into Russia, where would I start?
– Russia’s a black hole.
– I need Franziskaners.
Btw, they talk about “Russia” in the trailer but they’ve changed it to “India” for the final movie!
Christopher Crouzet
August 7, 2014 at 10:32 pm