The other day, I saw a movie* with an interesting scene in it. At the start of the scene, it’s a split screen. Each half of the screen, the camera is following a character walking down a hallway (two characters, one on each side). After a bit, the two characters both reach a corner, the two hallways come together, the split screen merges into a single pane, and the characters bump into each other. At the time I was watching it, I didn’t notice anything amiss, but on thinking about it more, I can’t see how that would be done: The part after the merger would have to be shot with a single camera, but the part before must have been with two cameras (or one at different times).
Now, I didn’t notice any discontinuities, but then, I wasn’t looking for them, either. I can think of a few ways to do this:
1: They filmed the part with the two cameras, then set up the one camera, carefully positioned the two actors in exactly the right locations, and started filming with one camera. If so, they did a really good job of it, since like I said, I didn’t notice any discontinuity.
2: The whole thing was filmed with one camera, far enough back from the corner that it was able to get the approaches along both “hallways” in the field of view, and what looked like two cameras was selective cropping from the one camera’s view. I don’t think this is it, since they used real hallways, and I don’t think they’d have had room for the camera to be far back enough.
3: A combination of the first two: Most of the separate hallways was done with two cameras, but just before the corner, they did a jump cut to one camera and did the cropping thing. We’ve gotten so used to jump cuts that I just might not have noticed it.
4: They filmed the two completely separately, with the cameras ending up in the same place and the actors never actually interacting. The collision itself must have been faked up somehow.
Is there a standard way to produce this sort of effect? It must have been something inexpensive, since the movie was made on a basically amateur budget.
The Piled Higher and Deeper movie, based on the webcomic
I haven’t seen the film, but I’m guessing number 1, with the possibility of a 3rd camera for the end shot.
If I could see the clip, I might be able to analyze the technique, but I don’t think there’s a name for this effect. Sounds like something the director may have conceived. Without having seen it, I’m WAGing that there was some use of computer compositing from the third camera used to flawlessly combine the two shots.
Michel Gondry loves to do this sort of inventive cinematography. There’s a similar split screen/branching he did in The Green Hornet.
I expect it’ll be leaked (or officially released) to YouTube soon enough, but it looks like it hasn’t yet (I checked before posting the OP). Would computer compositing like you describe be something within the resources of a college filmmaker?
Can’t stand the song, but I’ve always been impressed with this Cibo Matto video. It was done in one continuous take, making the whole thing more impressive. There’s a definite and deliberate discontinuity, but if this could be done on a video advance in the mid 1990s for a marginal major label band, I’m sure that more impressive work could be done on fairly cheap equipment today.
It does startle you a bit - but one of the comments explains it perfectly - first of all, stop the video at 0:30 and compare the sleeves - they are not the same. The walking girl was filmed separately, and the end of her walk when she reaches up was digitally projected on the greenscreen surface of the “mirror” which was in the scene that was filmed from the back with the “red-sleeve” girl reaching to it in the same gesture.
If it was shot in the last ~10 years (and the filmmaker competent enough) then absolutely.
Most college fare, especially, is shot digitally, so all editing and post is handled with computers. Final Cut Pro, After Effects/Nuke/Flame, make pulling off tricky shots pretty seamless if you know what your doing and really plan your shot(s).
Yeah, with the right software. I’m pretty sure I could recreate it. I’ve got Sony Vegas 7.0 and it’ll do all the compositing to merge two split screens into one. It’d take some careful choreography to make it work smoothly, but after that, it’s just time on a computer.
The effect is done particularly well here (especialy the black guy near the end that hands something over to the guy in the panel below - it really has a comic book live thing). Too bad it looks like it’s being used for nothing of interest.
Actually it is of interest, I believe in the movie the word is being sent around town to get the Green Hornet, so it illustrates how the message is getting around.
Yup, just made this year, and the head honcho on the project is a big nerd. I knew that things like that were possible on computers, but hadn’t realized it had made its way down to the consumer level. That’d explain it.
