Undivided /
Filming a war that will not hold still.
Five render passes, four of them inside somebody's shoulder.
A corner melee here is about four hundred units across and packed right up against the wall. Every eye-level camera we tried ended up inside the crowd: the first frame of the landing was a blue chest, the second a green elbow. Moving the camera back did not help, because the crowd moves too.
What works is altitude and distance together. The landed shot hovers over the wall corner, roughly six hundred units up and looking down at fifty degrees, where no body can reach the lens. The close-up then comes from the lens rather than the camera: the focal length pushes from 30 to 45 millimetres over the hold. Elites at 1.6 times troop scale read as elites at that distance; at eye level they were just bigger blue.
One more thing for the notebook. A cine camera set to manual exposure in this scene renders black, because the sun is only a few lux in this greybox. Auto exposure with fast adaptation, and the war comes back.