In our final film, we have two scenes with ‘special effects’ (both of which are basic enough to warrant quotation marks around the words special effects).
One of them was easier, and is from the POV of the actor as he looks around the room, sees Doc, then jolts – and in the motion blur Doc disappears. This was done with a lot more ease then expected, though we also think that (purely as a result of filming), that it was a lot less effective than we wanted, as it’s a bit odd that it takes as long to notice the dark figure as it does. Also, we used a tripod to try to stabilise the shot/make it easier to edit, but this makes it look less like it’s a POV shot. This was the shot that we were leaving in as a possibility, so it can always be removed.
The second one was a little more complicated, and involved making sure the set did not change at all between shots. It involved Doc – our malevolent beast – standing in the corner, and when our protagonist walks across the frame in front of him, Doc disappears. We did this by keeping the shot exactly the same and shooting twice – once with Doc standing there (and only Doc) and then again with our protagonist walking past (and no Doc). Then, through the power of editing, we merged them together and then masked Doc.
But, even though we were really cautious to keep everything the same, we didn’t think about our actor standing off set in the lights, and the slight difference he made to the shadow. It wasn’t a huge deal, but I still changed the way I intended on editing it.
Rather than just merging the shots, I cropped Doc out and placed him over the shot with the actor. I then started going frame by frame (tracking forwards as well) and individually tracked forwards, shifting each frame so it went around Matt as he approached.
The shot is also really dark and given we were shooting at 60fps, it probably didn’t matter if it wasn’t perfect.
This was the final product…
