When Hollywood wishes to make an epic movie, they often need to hire hundreds, if not thousands of extras. This costs a lot of money to pay all the background each day the movie is shooting the various larger scenes. Often the Hollywood films run into the tens of millions of dollars. Of course, often it is possible to use news footage, or footage from actual events in the real world, and since it comes from the real world it looks more realistic often enough.
Would you like me to give you a couple examples? Well, let's say you are making a disaster movie, why wouldn't you use the CNN footage, probably for a fee, of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami? What if you were involved in the Zombie drama genre? Well, it just so happens that there was a gigantic get together where everyone dressed up like zombies, thousands of people in fact. Imagine having that footage for your futuristic scary movie?
In Mexico City there was a group of 10,000 people marching in the streets and set a world record in fact. An article on this appeared in the LA Times on December 30, 2011 by Ken Ellingwood titled: "In Mexico, getting into Guinness can seem like a broken record," which stated:
"In November, the living dead took center stage: Nearly 10,000 people smeared with fake blood lurched through Mexico City's central plaza in what organizers said was the World's Biggest Zombie Walk. The record-setting phenomenon is, in part, testament to the eye-popping scale of the Mexican capital, the venue for many of the record-breaking stunts."
Gee, no wonder Britney Spears decided to do a free concert in the park on her visit to Mexico City - after all, if 10,000 people will dress up like Zombies, they'd probably be crazy enough to buy her latest music too! In fact, I can hear Katy Perry singing about something like this;
"Walking in the Dark, Zombies in the Park, Last Friday Night!"
Or better yet, Rob Zombie singing;
"Dead I am the one, Aztecs in the Sun, Zombies in the street, bleeding from their feet."
Still, all jokes aside, it would be quite wise for someone to take 20-50 of their friends with them to Mexico City to film something like this, and capture all those images for stock footage to sell to Hollywood. Anyone that produces scary movies would be very wise to invest in creating their own footage, or paying people a small amount of money as citizen journalists for capturing the images and videos for them. In fact they might have a contest, then claim copyrights for anything posted on a giant website. And from that website they would have tons of stock footage.
The website would get tens of thousands of hits, because everyone who went to the event would want to see themselves in the videos which were posted, and people would put links from their Facebook pages to the various videos. The owners of the website would build the stock footage for free, and then could make a movie and thus, save millions of dollars in costs, and/or could sell the footage they didn't use to other people who were also in the industry. It's a very good business model, and I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.
Lance Winslow has launched a new provocative series of eBooks on Future Concepts. Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank; http://www.worldthinktank.net/