Take a look behind the curtain into the world of post-production! In this episode of How It's Made, Jeffrey walks us through how our team used After Effects to turn an empty theatre into a full crowd of people for the Why Not Akron? video.

Video Transcript

Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of How It’s Made with PEG!

Today, we're going to be looking at a clip we did for a State of the City video for the city of Akron, Ohio. Let’s take a look at how this video was put together.

The video opens here with Kofi, our piano player, performing in an empty theater.

Now, if we advance to later in the video, we’ll see Kofi again — this time still playing in the theater — but now it’s full, concluding the video. Very cool!

Basically, the idea here is that Kofi is playing at the beginning in an empty theater, and then toward the end of the video, the theater is full.

Now, this is actually a trick shot, believe it or not. We did not film Kofi both in an empty theater and again in a theater full of people. This was done with a composite, and it’s a pretty simple one when you really break down the layers and see how it’s all constructed.

First of all, let’s take a look at the Kofi footage. This was filmed on the same day as the shot you saw earlier in the video, where the theater was empty. This is the stage look right here.

If we get rid of some of the masks we’ve put in, you can see what this is actually composed of. This shot is of Kofi in the empty theater — again, filmed the same day as the earlier shot. We never had him in a space where there was a full crowd.

What we did instead is come back on a separate day, using the exact same camera angle and exact same framing, referencing a still frame from the original shot. We then captured footage of a larger band performing in front of a true, ticketed crowd.

Because both shots were taken from the same angle, we were able to substitute the stage in with no problem at all. From there, it was all about color correcting and fine-tuning.

You can see there are some darkening layers here. There are minor adjustments. We shaded in the stage boxes a bit more, and we also added a darkening element over someone in the crowd who was lit up by their phone — that can be really distracting, so we just toned it down a bit.

And that’s really all there is to it.

This shot is made more by having the right camera angle and the right framing than by being some kind of complex special effects work. It’s actually pretty simplistic when you break it down.

Awesome — and that’s pretty much all there is to that!

Thanks for joining us here on How It’s Made at PEG. We’ll see you next time!