The long-awaited Sony and TriStar Pictures' project I Wanna Dance with Somebody hit theaters on December 23, 2022. This musical biopic on the late, great Whitney Houston follows her life and career as she rose to stardom. And a decade after the songstress’ death, this tribute movie is no less historic. I Wanna Dance with Somebody features game-changing volumetric capture crowd technology to depict some of Houston’s iconic performances. To help enhance the impact of her stage performances with authentic reactions, Virginia-based Avatar Dimension and London-based Dimension Studio collaborated with the visual effects team lead Zero VFX to create 1000 holograms of over 300 actors, each shot multiple times in various costumes with numerous reactions for the movie’s performance scenes.
Using the latest technological advances, the extras were recorded in volumetric 3D on Avatar Dimension’s mobile stage – transported from its Washington DC facility and set up in Boston, MA. Using 70 cameras to cover the scene in 360 degrees "allowed for more expansive camera moves and the flexibility in post to create new shots as required by the edit, some without the requirement to shoot pickups,” according to the film’s VFX supervisor, Paul Norris, and VFX producer, Tim Field. This made the technology cost-effective for the studio who didn’t have to pay for expensive re-shoots. The average shoot can be very costly for a TV or Film production, most starting at a million dollars a day, depending on the desires of the creative leadership and the complexity of the scenes. On top of that, crowd scenes can be expensive. The advances of technology makes such scenes more efficient and cost-effective to create.
Volumetric capture allowed for the editors to use fewer actors to replicate populations and fill a space, but also to move the camera around the venues to view the performances from any angle. Zero had complete creative control so they could swap out crowd members where necessary. “In fact, we were able to adjust the entire balance of the whole crowd by changing the ratios of the different actions as required by the director and editor to achieve the desired emotional tone for each shot,” said Norris. Volumetric capture is the future of filmmaking, saving studios millions of dollars when creating a crowd and a tone.
