How To Multiply Yourself In A Video
For this month's Filmmaking Q&A I answer how to multiply yourself in a video with duplicate camera tricks and an adobe premiere pro duplicate tutorial!
This month Dave asks "How do you have two of you on screen at the same time?" Great question Dave! So this one of the classic clone camera tricks that dates back to silent film days. It's basically a split screen effect.
In order to clone yourself into videos, what you do is you want to put your camera on a tripod and frame your shot for both characters. Now it's really important that you use a tripod for this and that you don't bump the tripod at all in between shots because you're going to need it to be exactly the same for all of the shots.
So once you have it framed up, you shoot one side first, making sure that that character doesn't cross to the middle of the frame and go to the other side. You want to keep them to the left side of the frame. Then you want to shoot the other side and again, make sure that the character on the right isn't crossing the middle of the frame, so be wary of the large arm movements that might cross over the center of the frame.
Next I'll show you how to clone yourself in a video premiere pro cc, but the same principles should work in any editing program. First, you're going to place each of your shots in your editing software, one on top of the other, and you're going to apply a crop to the one on top. Once you apply the crop, you're going to crop from the left side or the right side, whichever one works for your shot, all the way to the center so that you just have one half of the frame.
For the next step in the duplicate yourself camera trick tutorial, you're going to want to add some feathering to the crop so that way it sort of smooths the transition in between the two just in case there's any funkiness with the hard edge.
One thing you also want to look out for when you clone yourself is shadows because they can cause problems. If one of your characters is casting a shadow in the frame for the other character, that can be a real problem because that character's side won't have the shadow since it's you. You're just shooting you twice. So make sure that when you frame up your shot and you're looking at it, that none of the characters shadows are crossing over either. Otherwise you might have to really heavily feather to help that, but in some cases it might not fix it at all.
So now that you've watched this clone camera trick tutorial, you'll be seeing double in no time! Also keep an eye out for more clone camera trick tutorials in the future! I'm working on one specifically about how to have one actor play multiple roles. Now get out there and film it yourself!
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