F. Felix

Stock crowd footage? Internet Archive has some old stuff that might be funny if that's what you need.

It's a still shot, right? Use a digital camera so you can get instant feedback, then shoot dozens of shots until you get it right before you commit to film. Just start with your best guess & keep tweaking it until the pics look like the grab you posted. Add/take away lights, change their colors, fiddle with depth of field, adjust exposure, vary the shutter speed. When you're happy, then shoot it on film, but remember to bracket your exposure. Maybe use a film stock that emphasizes blues, like Ektachrome. The laser things are going to be tricky if you have to get everything on a single frame of film without compositing several layers. Might want to double-expose your film: paint streaks with a red flashlight in the dark, then re-expose the same film with the scene. Check YouTube for PikaPika, if you can't visualize what I'm saying. I think the idea is that you will learn a lot by using your eyes, experimenting & figuring it out for yourself. Good exercise.

I'd humbly suggest that the argument about which image format "looks more like reality" is a little flawed. Yes, maybe film reproduces what the eye sees better, but does that actually matter? Nothing else in filmmaking is about its actual representation of reality: it's about symbolism, interpretation & epistemology. I'd say that the look of video has become symbolic of reality through it's application to ENG & documentary, while the film look is representative of an idealized world. Take a good hard look at your message, then choose.

Interesting conversation. Responding to the initial question about science behind the use of specific camera techniques, eye-tracking studies are commonly used to assess media engagement. The amount of time spent looking at an image can be used to evaluate the interest level of observers. This has been used many ways: for instance, researchers employed these (& other) techniques to establish rudimentary mathmatical skills in infants & dogs. More to the current point, eye-tracking has been used to develop educational television, as in the series "Blue's Clues" which used it to assess the effectiveness of various "Sesame Street" segments & employed this information to develop more focussed, compelling content for children. As for film targeted at (semi) grown-ups, I don't imagine film schools discuss this research directly. The job of a school is to teach the rules so that the students can eventually go out & break them usefully. Ineffective film technique choice is probably more about style & fashion--answer the question of why the same audience feels it necessary to wear pants down around their butt cheeks & you will undoubtedly have discovered why shaky camera work is also the rage. The fact that fashion generally originates in a practical situation--gang prisoners having their belts taken away in the case of the pants--doesn't mitigate the power of the associated image: tough guys wear their pants low, ergo only wimps hang their sartorial splendor from their hip-bones. In the case of the influential, precedented, yet still pioneering handheld camera work on MTV, I might speculate that it originated not in science, but in the use of low-budget workers & techniques, since the operation was an underfunded experiment--to wit, the infamous astronaut logo was chosen entirely because NASA imagery is public domain, therefore no royalty fees. The association of the camera work with the coolness of the music videos probably lent "street-cred" to the amateurish shakiness that we are still witnessing today. I suppose we should also remember the post-modern contributions of thinkers like Derrida & McLuhan who pointed out that the packaging of the message carries at least as much power & information as the message itself...& perhaps more effectively, since being hidden in plain sight, it bypasses our sceptical filters. Maybe that's why we object so much to film fluff: when style trumps story, the only purpose is to reinforce the culture represented by the technique. This is nothing more than brainwashing.