We knew very early on that we would have to represent a huge crowd in our movie. Doing this in 3D is generally a challenge and was out of question for our small team. It quickly seemed very logical and entirely in line with the theme of our film to do it in 2D: our character feels so disconnected that the representation of the other people around her is altered, she is in 3D while the crowd is in 2D.
"To bring the crowd to life, we recorded sequences of people walking on green screens from different angles, then painting a single frame which was then interpolated using EBSynth saving us a ton of time as we didn’t need to animate each frame of animation. We then used AI to generate animated normal maps and motion capture data to get accurate lighting interactions between the silhouettes and the 3D environment.