The Cross Dissolve: Its history, process in film, and lots of interesting facts Spuds looks at the history of the Cross Dissolve, what it took to produce it back in the day and how lucky, so lucky we are to be living in the digital age of editing.

If you haven't seen our video on The Cross Dissolve and how it was done before the days of digital editing, go take a look since it does a very good job at giving some insight on how the process of optical effects was executed when all they had was real film to work with.

Today, we have the luxury of firing up a compositing program like Adobe After Effects, Apple Motion, BlackMagic Fusion and doing a bunch of neat things in the digital domain. But the art of In Camera visual effects can still prove to be useful, especially if you use them in the right place.

In the sketch accompanying this video, we employed the use of both an in camera effect and compositing a digital effect in Adobe After Effects. But wait, let's back up a sec and define what an In Camera effect is.

In Camera Effects

In Camera means, exactly what you think. It is a visual effect that is executed solely by using techniques in and on the camera. It’s sometimes known as a practical effect. It's basically an effect that gets recorded on your source, whether it be film on an SD card.

Pepper's Ghost

Now the first ghost effect used in the sketch was an In Camera effect. It's known as Pepper's Ghost and was a visual effect developed by a scientist named John Henry Pepper in 1862, who enhanced an effect originally developed by a man named Henry Dircks. It employs a method where a glass is placed in front of the viewer, or in our case the camera at a 45 degree angle. The camera can see through the glass to the scene in front of it, but it also picks up reflections from objects placed and reflected on the mirror. It's basically a live composite. Now, although we used the effect in kind of a hokey, humorous manner, you’d be surprised where it’s been used in tv and film. In the BBC series Sherlock it’s used to show a ghost that Sherlock had to decipher. In the 1990 movie Home Alone, it was used in a different way. To protect Joe Pesci from being horribly burned by the blow torch trap, but still look believable, they superimposed his face onto a mannequin using pepper’s ghost technique. CGI wasn’t quite mature enough back then to make it look authentic. It's an effect still used to this day in amusement parks, video games and little device known as the teleprompter. In fact, to do our version of Pepper’s ghost, that’s exactly what we used; our teleprompter glass.

Digital Effects

Good ol' After Effects use for a digital composite.

Most of us are familiar with compositing programs like After Effects or Apple Motion. They are used in visual effects in the digital domain to create anything from titles and simple animations to full blown special effects.

Now, on to how we used the effect. During the hallway scene, the first appearance of Micah's "ghost" fades into view for a few seconds and then disappears. This was done In Camera, using Pepper's ghost method. I set up the main camera down the hall, next to the kitchen. Then I used our teleprompter glass and set it in front of the camera at a 45 degree angle.

For the ghost effect, first, I had to black out the kitchen as much as possible, so light wouldn't leak into the effect. The only thing I wanted to show up was my "ghost". So I waited until nightfall so I wouldn’t have to black out all my windows. Then I set up my scene, putting black cloth everywhere the camera could see. I placed a dimmable LED par in front of the ghost and controlled it with one of the dimmers we built in a previous tutorial.

We got a nice clean white sheet and my talent is in place. I had to control the lighting in the hallway and it’s a good thing that my house has Philips Hue lighting as I could control the color and intensity of the lights from an app on my phone. As a side note, Philips Hue lights are awesome.

After a few tries we came up with the best shot we could…that is before it got too late and my on screen talent had to go to bed. What can I say, he works on the cheap.

The end result was our fully in camera ghost apparition. No digital effects needed!

In hindsight, we would probably have used more light in the hall to see the effect better, then darken it in post. But we really didn’t want to mess with the image too much to let the effect stand on its own.

Ghost in Digital Form

For Micah’s second ghost appearance, this was done digitally in After Effects. We locked off the camera in the wide shot and added a green screen to his area. This is so we could remove him from the background but still keep proportions and perspective consistent. We also made sure to get a clean plate, which is a shot of the scene with no actors for later.

Then it’s off to After effects where we mask, add Keylight plugin, throw some lighting and glow effects and voila! We have our ghost again.

There is a time and place for both in camera and digital effects. If you don’t have access to compositing software but you have a camera and some ingenuity, the possibilities are endless. Of course with digital, you have many options in post after you are done shooting, but usually your set up and foresight is still just as important.

The bottom line is, there are awesome things you can do with a camera without becoming an expert in software.

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