
Our current feature Celluloid Soul rolls along on its lucky 13th day of production with an exercise in synchronicity and timing. This day’s segment was shooting a composite of 1939 actress Ida Beswick (Lauren Baldwin) walking and talking alongside screenwriter Monty Suggins (Dennis Kinard). To achieve this illusion, we first shot Dennis walking by himself…
Then we shot various versions of Lauren in front of a green screen. We did some shots where she just walked in place, and we did some shots where she was actually moving forward, while the green screen was moved along with her. That became a problem when we ran out of real estate.
When we added the black and white effects and stabilized the image, our composite looks something like this.
Fortunately, there aren’t a lot of scenes in the movie that take this much work. Some of the other FX shots have Lauren either sitting or standing, which requires much less of an effort.
At this stage we are 13 days into production and have about 11 more to go. Of course, that will still be stretched out over several months. Our films take awhile to shoot because we always work around everyone’s schedules, but we all enjoy what we do and all have that common goal of seeing it through to the finish…eventually.