At Framestore, I developed a crowd extension workflow for two shots in The Agency. Both look down on a car moving through a busy market in Nairobi. The filmed extras did not fill the edges of the frame, and the moving camera and interaction with the vehicle made flat crowd cards unsuitable.

The approach used 3D to control placement, perspective and movement, with generative AI providing the final character appearance. I built the crowd in Blender using the production camera track, library characters and animations. Additional animation layers varied their behaviour: some people watched the car pass, while others stayed focused on what they were doing.

We composited intermediate renders onto the original footage so that placement and animation could be approved before generating the final characters. Each person was then processed separately, using references from the filmed crowd to match the lighting and visual character of the scene.

A stabilisation setup in Nuke kept each rendered character centred for processing. The transformations were then reversed to return them to their original position in the shot. Deliveries included the character image, an alpha and a 3D contact mask to support the ground shadows in compositing.

I designed the generation and stabilisation systems, developed small Blender and Nuke tools, and carried the work through to delivery. The process still required careful checking: generated proportions and perspective could drift, particularly in the overhead views.

The initial group of fifteen extras expanded to around fifty in the first shot, followed by roughly thirty in a second. Both shots appear in the finished series.