Feb 1st, 2018 : Air Heads

[xoxoxoBruce]

Wow, look at that crowd, it’s Yuge, the biggest crowd in history. They sit there in rapt attention, anticipating their hero at the podium.
Then the crowd goes crazy,
when hero hits the stage.
You get lost as the police bossed
the crowd back in a rage!

Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) is expensive and extras are difficult to handle, besides costing money. The Inflatable Crowd Company offers the alternative – plastic, inflatable mannequins, thirty thousands of them for use in movies where large crowd is required.

The company was formed in 2002 for creating crowd scenes for the Hollywood movie Sea Biscuit. Their inflatable crowd have since appeared in over 80 feature films including many memorable ones like The King’s Speech, Frost/Nixon, American Gangster, Spiderman 3 and many more. These plastic men and women were featured in many TV shows and commercials as well.

Like the other Yuge crowds, it's full of hot air.

link

[Carruthers]

Using mannequins/dummies to deceive has a long and honourable history. Honourable, that is, if you were on the Allied side.

Lieutenant-Commander Tony Bentley-Buckle Obit. 5th Sept 2010.

Lieutenant-Commander Tony Bentley-Buckle, who has died aged 88, spent the last 18 months of the Second World War as a prisoner-of-war in Germany, when he and his fellow inmates of Marlag-O, a PoW camp for naval officers in northern Germany, built a man-sized dummy called “Albert RN”.

The dummy was hidden in towels and carried in its component parts to the wash house outside the camp, where it was assembled. It was then carried back into camp in the midst of the marching men, leaving one man to hide in the latrine while the Germans made their headcount. Later the hiding man would emerge and make his escape.

Bentley-Buckle was the camp’s watch repairer and lock picker, and he made the mechanism which enabled Albert’s eyes to blink and move, giving added realism to the dummy. In 1953 a highly fictionalised version of the episode was made into a film, Albert RN, but Bentley-Buckle’s true wartime adventures, behind enemy lines in Italy and Yugoslavia, were even stranger than fiction.

Trailer from the 1953 film...



Daily Telegraph obituary. Paywalled, but you know the score.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Why not phony people, they used phony everything.

[Carruthers]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Why not phony people, they used phony everything.

The comic genius Spike Milligan said in his autobography that a decoy airfield, complete with plywood aircraft, was bombed by the Luftwaffe using wooden bombs.

A rare example of Teutonic humour.

[Diaphone Jim]

Hey, how did El Chapo get in there?
http://news.images.itv.com/image/fil...stream_img.jpg

The air pump on the missile truck takes a little away.

[xoxoxoBruce]

The air pump looks like an outrigger in aerial photographs.