CLONE EFFECT - DIY motion control and After Effects | Tutorial

- Hey, this is Steve from Unexplored Films back with some more filmmaking tips and tricks. Today we are trying to recreate the 'clone' effect seen in films like Back to the Future 2 and The Man in the Iron Mask - where one actor plays two parts in the same frame, but the camera is not limited to being static. Now a clone effect where the camera doesn't move has been happening for, literally, a hundred years. Buster Keaton was doing it. It's been done many times over the years. It's not difficult. You can shoot one half, shoot the other half and disguise the join. The real clever development was when people worked out how to do this using motion control, where you would have people like Michael J. Fox playing themselves twice in the frame, but the camera was doing exactly the same move every time. It's the smooth camera movement in these shots that sells the idea that these are all different characters and it really makes for a much more impressive scene than just a static shot where everyone can tell how the effect was done. The system that Industrial Light and Magic used for this was the VistaGlide which could perfectly recreate the same camera movement multiple times after it had been programmed. Now, today, motion control rigs are becoming cheaper all the time and often the sorts of rigs you would see for time lapse photography can come in handy for this, but we wanted to see if we could pull off this effect essentially just using what we already had, a regular slider without any kind of motion control capability. For our version, I basically copied what The Man in the Iron Mask did and had one version of myself walking around the other version in a sort of intimidating way, as if he's just caught his own clone or twin and is deciding what to do with him. So our challenge for this was to try this without any form of real motion control. We were basically trying to copy the same movement twice, manually. Now, to do this without a green screen would be almost impossible because the green screen allows you to cut out the different elements and shift them around slightly if you didn't quite get the move right. So what we did was we first set up a green screen and we blocked out an area in front of the camera where this was going to take place. So the first thing to do was to film me playing one version of the character walking around a light stand with a marker on the top of it as if I was walking around the other version of the character. We measured the distance of the slider and added numbers for consistent sliding timing. We recorded me counting one to ten and the idea would be that the operator would push the camera past each number whilst the numbers were being read out. That ensures that we get basically the same speed each time. The operator's second challenge was to pan, keeping the subject in the center of the frame whilst moving the camera along the rail in time with the numbers. So this was quite a complicated camera move to do, but it meant that we could essentially get the same camera move two or three times by having a reference for the speed and a reference for the pan. Small adjustments could be made later to line up all of the images on top of each other because the camera move was never going to be 100% the same each time because we don't have motion control, but this is to demonstrate that you can actually do this with a little bit of creativity using just what you've got. After we'd shot the first version of the character, I changed clothes and donned a questionable wig to try and make the other character look a bit different. We played one as kind of smart and one as kind of scruffy looking and this time we filmed me standing in place of the light stand so the operator repeated the move in time with the numbers and this time tried to keep me center frame like with the light stand. All I had to do this time was to remember where I had walked as the other character and look in the same directions as where that character was walking. Next we had to create a background. Now, we could have shot this in the same room where we filmed it, but I thought it would be more interesting - albeit a bit of challenge for matching the lighting - to film the background in a different area. If you want to make life easy for yourself, I would just take down the green screen and film in the same place where you filmed the characters, but we did this in a shed in the end because it created a more interesting background. So, once again, we repeated the same camera move with the light stand. We could do a nice, smooth pan, keeping the light stand in the center of the frame and moving the camera along the slider in time with the numbers. The background then became kind of our main layer to attach everything else to. That was our, sort of, reference because we knew that the light stand was in a consistent place. So then we did a rough overlay to see the best takes over the top and you can already see that there are some discrepancies with where the camera was and where it needs to be. But that's not going to be a problem because we shot it in front of the green screen. So next, we lined up the light stand in the take with the smart guy with the gun over the top of the take with the light stand in the shed. And straight away we had a pretty clean version of what looked like the smart character walking around the light stand in the shed. Next we lined up the scruffy character over the light stand to try and get a clean version of him and again, there were little discrepancies in the movement so we just tried our best to line him up over the light stand and kind of make it look like he was standing in the same place the whole time. Next we ended up with a pretty clean version of the two characters in the same environment, but already you can see the problem that the character that's meant to pass in front is of course on the layer behind. So we had to create another layer of just the parts of him that would be in front of the scruffy character and all of a sudden that looks more believable, like he's walking around the other character. We also added some letterbox bars to the top and bottom just to hide the fact that the layers weren't lined up quite well enough on top of each other at the bottom of the image. Now the next thing to do was to do some color correcting and just make the characters look like they were actually in the shed. Again, if you shot all of this in the same place, this wouldn't even really be an issue. We actually added a light in After Effects to the scruffy character just to kind of take the shine off the edge where the compositing had happened. We'd got a bit 'backlight happy' when we filmed it in front of the green screen and we decided - you know what, this doesn't look like the same light that's in the shed. We also created an artificial shadow where the smart character would actually have been blocking the light source of the scruffy character. And then the finishing touch was to actually add some artificial camera wobble and zoom to this image because there's a shot in The Prestige where they do this. They have Hugh Jackman walking around another version of Hugh Jackman, but it basically looks like a hand held shot and I always thought that sells the fact that they're both there so much better than any kind of dolly mounted shot. So we borrowed that idea and actually added the camera wobble to this so that your brain is worrying less about the little discrepancies in the wobble because the whole thing's wobbling anyway. So the trick with this is start with a static shot and add the camera wobble rather than trying to film it with a hand held camera on the day. As the smart character walks around, we kind of move from a wide shot to more of a medium close up and this kind of helped disguise the fact that this has been done on a slider in the steadiest way possible. And with a few finishing touches like some weather outside we were pretty happy with this as a proof of concept of this effect. And so this means that using nothing more than a regular camera and a regular slider with no motion control whatsoever, we were basically able to do a pretty good version of the motion control effect. So I hope that was entertaining and enlightening. Please give it a go. Tell me what you think and hit that subscribe button if you want to see more of these. I've been Steve from Unexplored Films and I will see you next time.

Channel: Steve Ramsden

Views: 97,610

Keywords: motion control, camera slider, cloning tutorial, cloning tutorial after effects, cloning tutorial on adobe premiere pro cs6, sim cloning tutorial, how to clone yourself, how to, visual effects, explanation, cgi, movies, film, back to the future, the man in the iron mask, clone, effect, duplicate, actor, same, shot, filmmaker, indie, independent, filmmaking, behind-the-scenes, bttf, back to the future part ii (award-winning work), vistaglide, dolly, moving shot, back to the future 2, steve ramsden

Id: xyeNzU3Smoc

Length: 7min 11sec (431 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 12 2019