Do you want the shadow to be a shadowy ghostly figure that walks or a shadow that projects on the ground and wall.

For the first film the shadow character in the room without any other actors and without moving the camera, than later shoot the characters without the shadow, put the layers ontop of each other and make the shadows layer 10% or something. The rest of the room should line ontop of each other (you didn't move the camera, right?) and thus only the character will appear at 10%. The actors should appear normal and if they do not you can use a garbage mask around them to eliminate any of the 10% set showing through.

The second way is harder but similar. You do the same thing with bright lighting to make sure there is a noticable shadow on the wall, and then when you layer things you not only do the 10% thing but mask out the bulk of the shadows layer to remove the figure that generates the shadow and the rest of the overdone lighting.

I'm sure there are other ways but those to come immediately to mind.

RJSchwarz
San Diego, CA

Thanks a lot, thats given me food for thought. I never thought of doing it like the first way you described before, I might try it.
See the kind of look I want for the man, is kind of more like a silhouette than a shadow, he is there like an actual human, just no features at all. Im not sure if that makes much sense but there must be some way to erase an object (a moving one of that) of all its features and turn it into this 'silhouette' in a room which is quite bright, the opposite really, which you would never really see in real life.

You'd have to make the actor as dark as possible by clothing and possibly makeup. To make him like a silhouette, so long as you want him to be solid black, you could rotoscope each frame and "paint" over him with black in Photoshop or possibly After Effects. It could be somewhat time consuming for longer shots with lots of movement, but it wouldn't take very long to do if he were standing somewhat still. There might be a way to use After Effect's motion tracking to create a solid black mask and have it follow the actor's motions, though I'm not totally sure on this.

It might also be important to match the grain/noise of the original footage to that on the silhouette. If the original scene has even a small amount of noise, the effect won't appear as good if the dark actor is the only thing that shows up too clear. If you decide to rotoscope, add the black color on a separate layer and be sure to apply a "Add Noise/Grain" type of filter to that layer. It'd probably be easier to just ensure that the original shot is very well lit.

Thanks, I think I see what you mean. The Shot of the man will be light heavily & will only last between 5 - 10 seconds. This will be filmed in mini DV, so I understand what you mean about matching the grain there.

But about Photoshop and after effects, can you explain to me the key differences between these.

Photoshop would require frame-by-frame processing, loading one image at a time. Five seconds of video would require covering the figure with black in 150 frames.

I'm not very experienced in After Effects, but I'm sure it'd be able to produce the same result much quicker. Again, I'm not totally certain, but After Effects may allow you to apply motion tracking to a video mask. If possible, you'd be able to adjust the contrast/brightness of just the figure while the lighting of the rest of the scene would remain intact.

I've also heard of lens filters that can help in creating an effect like this. I don't remember what they're called, but the sample pictures showed a blacked-out figure against a normal background.

Thanks a lot for these great tips, Im definitely going to being looking into them all.
If you ever remember the particular lens filter too, let me know..