Freestanding man in the middle of a moving crowd

[Joey Foreman]

Then you have to Rotoscope every person that you want appear in front of him.
Post your results this summer.

[Michael Szalapski]

Shoot it yourself.
Or
Lots of rotoscoping.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

[Joey Foreman] “Rotoscope…post your results this summer.”
*giggle*

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Joey Foreman]

Since those figures are surrounded by so much white space you might be able to speed up the process by keying out the white or using transfer modes to isolate certain areas.

[Joey Foreman]

I wonder if you could make a high contrast luma matte out of this.
Duplicate the layer of the crowd footage. Add a levels effect and push the left and rightmost pointers in until the image is hi contrast black and white.
Maybe add a bit of Smart blur. Although the footage is already pretty blurry.
Set the matte for the lower layer to Luma Matte.
That should key out the white areas, hopefully.
Precompose those two layers, moving all attributes to the new comp.
Put your keyed guy below this precomp, and white solid under that.
That should give you a starting point. You’ll probably need to tweak those levels sliders.
Now all of the people will be in front of your guy, but the ones to the sides may still appear to be farther back.
Just see what you get.

[Joey Foreman]

Oh yeah. On the top layer used for your Luma Matte, you should also add a Shift Channels effect. Set Take Alpha from Full On.
Set the Take Red, Green, and Blue from whichever channel has the highest contrast already. I think you could also set them all to Luminance for a similar result.

It also just occurred to me that you’ll either need to set your track matte for the lower layer to Luma Matte Inverted, or add an Invert effect to the top layer.

[Sascha Reisüber]

Thanks for all the responses. You´ve helped me a lot. The idea from Joey was great.
The effect which I get, if I work with Luma Matte, is precisely what I need.

Further I am testing some effects with lights out, so that the guy doesn´t look like someone who is glued in the scene.

@Dave: I want to set the guy in a medium close-up, so that you only see upper part of the body.
You are right if you say that the situation can´t work in the real world. But to quote Richard Willams (Who framed Roger Rabbit), the situation don´t need be realistic, it must be believable.

Thanks for help everyone!