On the TV show Orphan Black, the main actress plays several characters who often appear onscreen simultaneously, to pretty amazing, seamless effect - I assume this is all done digitally, no? Isn’t that kind of processing extremely expensive? This isn’t a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster movie - how does a show that originates on a Canadian sci-fi cable channel afford it?
It must be getting cheaper. Natalie Tran has been doing it(not as complicated) for years now on literally zero budget.
Watch this little video, but be aware she does it a lot more in other videos.
no other tv shows however, does it as good and as often as Orphan Black. they eclipse and interact with each other without a hint of cgi or cut and paste like the youtube girl.
Yeah, it’s so much more than the “Alice and her cousin on the Brady Bunch” split screen effect - in the episode I just watched, one character passed behind the other while the whole thing was also reflected in a mirror in the background.
The finale, I think, this year had a great dance party. Only Felix was in the whole thing, as all the other clones must have filmed separately. It was very well done.
Remember when Multiplicity was a big deal? Now a TV show can do even more.
why don’t we see this more often then? the relatively recent Battlestar Galactica had clones, and it didn’t do half as good a job as Orphan Black does.
This Video explains how intricate the special effect of multiple clones… “motion control” it’s technically a mind fuck. I think the technology is available, but it is incredibly difficult to get right, so besides an Emmy for Tatiana, this show needs an Emmy for Technical brilliance.
I can do that kind of visual effect at home, using off-the-shelf software. It just takes time and experienced artists to achieve it. It’s no longer as expensive to do basic greenscreen keying and compositing as it used to be. The filming of the effects (motion control) can be tricky, but even that isn’t that expensive or complicated these days.
Gone are the days of sending this off to Industrial Light and Magic and it taking three months to complete.
[quote=“Andiethewestie, post:7, topic:692605”]
This Video explains how intricate the special effect of multiple clones… “motion control” it’s technically a mind fuck. I think the technology is available, but it is incredibly difficult to get right, so besides an Emmy for Tatiana, this show needs an Emmy for Technical brilliance.
[/QUOTE] Thanks, that was interesting.It’s really seamless and compelling, enough so that I never thought about it, even though I knew it was the same actress playing all the parts. Pretty remarkable acting too, though I didn’t buy her male character. That’s the only one that I really didn’t buy. I’ll give her a pass on that. The only case I can think of where a woman played a man and I bought it completely was Linda Hunt in Year of Living Dangerously (though I bet there were cases I never even noticed.)
To be fair, she does have a body double they use to shoot most of the scenes; she’s not just acting to cardboard picture of herself. Since the double gets dressed up as the other clone, any shot where they’re looking from behind the double can just use the double, and they can loop her lines in afterwards.
Well she acts with the body double first, but then she has to remember the motion to do the scene again alone so that her clone can re-do what the double just did to be digitally placed in the scene. She’s not only camera blocking with the body double, she is full on acting to get the motion and the emotion correct. That’s incredble, it’s got to be mentally exhausting for her.
If the show goes on too much longer the actress could come down with multiple personality disorder.
They save scads on actress wages. Sure, you’ve got to pay her some overtime, but not much.
More seriously, Space channel is a subsidiary of CTV/Bell Media/Bell, which also makes the show, so they probably didn’t have to pay anything at all. And Bell had already sold the rights to the BBC before they started filming. If anyone can afford to make a pricy TV show, Bell can.
Maybe that was a job requirement?