Hey guys, Steve from Unexplored Films here and today, we are going to try and add me into some of our favorite movies just like Quentin Tarantino
did with Rick Dalton, Leonardo DiCaprio's character in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood." Now, we are not just going
to ADD me to these movies, which is simple enough if you just want to put yourself into the
background of a scene, but we are going to do what Tarantino did and do a full actor replacement and have me interact with
the other characters. So we first need to find a method of erasing the original
actor, creating a clean background behind them
and then dropping in my new performance,
which we're going to film in front of a green screen,
over the top of this. Now, this effect is somewhat similar to what they did in "Forrest
Gump" when they added Tom Hanks into some historical footage and you can check out my video on that. And it's also similar to the technique that can be used to
complete the performance of an actor who dies
during a film's production such as Oliver Reed in "Gladiator." But the main reason I
wanted to try this effect was it just sounded really fun. And if you're enjoying
these DIY Hollywood effect tutorials, please consider subscribing and you won't miss any. And thanks for all the amazing support so far for this channel. So the first thing I needed to do was to try and find some key scenes in films that I could
try this effect with. And this was partly
down to the movie clips I could find available online. I knew I wanted to use the
scene from "The Great Escape" that Tarantino had done
and I also selected the art gallery scene from "Skyfall" where Bond meets Q, the scene in "The Wolf of Wall Street"
when Jordan and Donnie are sitting on the couch together and the scene from "The Departed" where Matt Damon and Leonardo
DiCaprio are in the lift. In all of these cases,
I was looking for scenes where two actors were appearing next to each other where I could replace one of them,
and where there was some good possibilities for interaction and I was also looking for scenes that were either filmed on a tripod or were at least pretty steady. This is really going to help when erasing one of the actors and
recreating the background. The first thing I did was open each clip in Premiere and save a freeze frame each time the actor made a big movement. This is because each time they move, they are basically revealing
a new part of the background and we're going to use all of these to create a composite
of a clean background without the actor. Next, I opened the frames in Photoshop and there are a couple of ways we can try and remove the actor. If you use the lasso tool to cut out a certain area, Photoshop
will actually have a go at using "content aware fill" to replace the area with what's around it. However, as clever as this was, it doesn't get it completely right and I prefer to do it manually. So if you duplicate
your layer and turn off the layer on the bottom
before you do the cut out on the top layer, this will
just leave a blank space and Photoshop won't attempt
to fill in the gap itself. Next, I could take my other freeze frames from the same scene where
the actor had moved, I could once again cut out the actor and I could overlay these and pretty soon I had a background where most of the actor was already missing. And this just left a very small part that I had to cover up, which you can do using the clone stamp
tool to copy and paste areas of the nearby background. Once you're happy with
your blank background, you can save this as a new still image. So I repeated this process
with all the different clips that I had selected to
try this effect with and the great thing about doing this first is that when you come to do your filming, you can be testing the clips immediately to see if they work. And if the actor doesn't move very much in the shot that you're hoping to create a background for, you may be able to find a very similar background in another shot and just use a bit of
that to fill the gap. "The Wolf of Wall Street" also included this foreground element of this low table so I cut that out as
well as a separate layer because I knew eventually, my performance would have to sit behind it. Okay, so now we need to
add our still background back into our footage
and retain the elements that are moving that we want. So I opened the original
shot in After Effects and dropped in my still
background over the top. Now I could draw a mask
around the German officer because of course we want
him to still be moving. And his layer is going to now sit on top of the still background. So I just had to key frame
the mask a little bit to match his movement
and because his shoulder is in front of Steve McQueen's jacket, I had to keep the mask really close to his shoulder for that part. So I did this for all the characters who were going to still be moving in the shots next to
me, and keyframed them up to their edges if the
character I was playing was going to move directly behind them. And then for any shots that
move slightly like this one, we need to track the movement of the take. So for that we can use the
motion tracker markers, and if you want to learn
about that in more detail, check out my video on adding
set extensions to miniatures. So now we can create a null
object with a camera move and attach the still
background to the null object and it will move in exactly the same way as the original take. And that was all the edit prep done, and now it was time to start the filming. So this wasn't a massive
room that we tried it in and usually with a green screen, you want as much space
behind your actor as possible so that you don't get
the green spill onto them and you need room to evenly light it, but in the end we were able
to basically do even lighting with two large lights on each side of the top corners and two smaller lights on the bottom two corners. We also had a large key
light with a soft box on it and that was going to be my main light for copying the lighting
in the original films. And a couple of small,
battery-operated LED panels, which we could use as back
lights and fill lights and that sort of thing. If you can, set your camera
to shoot the same frame rate as the original clips. Also, I decided to shoot
in a flat picture profile because I knew I was going to do a lot of color correcting and I
wanted maximum flexibility in my shadows and highlights. And I also did a little
white balance test first, just to check that the
whites that I was getting was pretty similar to what I was seeing in the original films. So looking at the original scenes from the films, I could
work out a few things. I could basically work out
the height of the camera and the distance and
roughly the focal length they had used. I was also looking at the directions the light was coming
from and I could use that to try and create something similar with the lights that I had. I also tried to copy
Steve McQueen's eyeline. Now, he's looking at the German officer, so I actually set up the monitor where I could see what I was filming as my eyeline and that
was really, really helpful because that gave me a point to look at and I could also check that the shot was looking good while
I was doing the scene. Next I had to learn the timings of the original clip
because my performance had to be the same length
and I had to say the lines in the same place, so that when I added it into the original clip,
everything would match. I found the easiest way to do this was to play the original clip on a loop and listening to the audio, I could talk and move in time with the original clip and I could record several
takes until I thought I had one that worked. And this was a bit like learning a dance. And I assume this is how
Tarantino did it as well. I didn't worry about the audio; I thought I could re-record that later. - (Officer) 10 days isolation, Hilts. - (McQueen and Steve) Captain Hilts. - (Officer) 20 days. - (McQueen and Steve) Right. Oh, you'll still be here when I get out? - Once I reviewed the takes and thought I had one that worked, I could then move on to the next shot and the next lighting set up. For the reverse shot
in "The Great Escape," the sun is now camera
left from this top corner so I switched off my main key light and just used one of the small LED panels to be that light at the side. This time I could basically
face the green screen but still see the monitor
and film over my shoulder. For the scene in the art
gallery from "Skyfall," I added a bench so that I would be sitting and just lowered the camera to the height of the actors in the original scene. The action here was a
handshake which luckily you don't see and then
handing Bond a letter. And then for the closeup,
I just had to rotate the bench slightly, and again
try and match the eyeline by using the monitor as my focal point. For the scene in the
lift in "The Departed," it kind of looks like there's a main light in the middle of the lift ceiling. So again, I used one
of the small LED panels to try and replicate that. And because Leo has basically caught Matt Damon and he's kind of holding him in handcuffs and making sure he doesn't escape, I held my jacket up at head height to give me somewhere to focus
and it had the added benefit of adding a little bit
of shadow onto my shirt. "The Wolf of Wall Street" clip was harder because the camera had to be further away and it had to look like
I was sitting on a couch. So rather than try and recreate
this in the same space, I simply moved the lights
and the green screen and shot this sitting on my real couch. It meant that I could have
my hand at the right height with some cushions under it,
and I didn't need to move much in this one anyway, so
I figured I could probably mask out anything that was a big problem. So I loaded my takes into After Effects and could line them up with the originals by either using the audio
or by turning the opacity down to halfway. And then as usual, I could
use Keylight to remove the green screen. For this, you select a fairly average part of the green color to
remove, and then under Screen Matte, you can use 'clip
black' and 'clip white' to refine this further. And you might also want to
adjust 'screen softness' and 'screen shrink and grow' just to make the edge a bit nicer. Once you've removed the green screen, you can then draw a basic mask around your figure to get rid of anything that you don't want in the frame. I could use the original actor to line up my new performance in
basically the same place. And if you scale your
performance to the right size, you should be able to match pretty well with what was there originally. Next, I could add the Lumetri Color effect and set about trying
to turn my flat footage into something that looked
basically like the original. So this was a little different every time but if you experiment with
things like the exposure, the temperature, the tint,
contrast and the saturation, you should be able to make the colors look more like the original. Another method I used was
to open the color wheels and try and match
specifically the highlights to the original highlights,
the midtones to the original midtones, and the shadows
to the original shadows. You can switch back on the
layer with the original actor to really try and get those colors as similar as you can. This color matching is
probably one of the best ways of trying to sell that
you're in the same frame and that you're interacting
with these famous people, and if you put your
lights in the right place to begin with, that should also do a lot of the hard work for you. If it's an older film
like "The Great Escape," you might want to add some blur or some grain or dust and scratches to try and match the old footage as best as you can. And then for any shots that move, remember to parent the
layer with your new footage to the null object you made
which has the shot's movement so that your character will
be moving with your blank background and everything else. Finally, I went back into Premiere and did my sound design. So I simply clipped out the lines that were spoken by the original actor and re-recorded them in
rooms that sounded similar. For any clips that are set outdoors, try and re-record these
lines outdoors as well. "Oh, you'll still be here when I get out?" And because old sound recordings often sound less bassy
than what we can do today, I found that also adding
a slight Highpass filter took out some of the bass and again, that just made it match a little better with the original audio. - (Officer) 10 days isolation, Hilts. - Captain Hilts. - 20 days. - Right. Oh, you'll still be here when I get out? - Cooler. - 007. - You feel anything? - No. (sighs) Been 35 minutes. - Just (beep) kill me. - I am killing you. And that was pretty much it. That was my improvised method for erasing the original actor and adding myself into these films, so that I could interact with the other actors. And if you've enjoyed this one, why not drop a comment below about what Hollywood effect you would like to see recreated next! So guys, please hit that subscribe button if you enjoyed this, it means a lot and thank you for all your amazing support for this channel so far. I've been Steve from Unexplored Films and I will see you next time.
