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I'm making a horror movie and need a few tips.
1. How do I make my actors seem ghost like?
2. How do I Record my actors in a dark room with no lights, but still see their figures? and or them?

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I would do both tricks roughly the same way. First shoot the room and what is going on without your ghost/actors. Then shoot the ghost actors in the room without moving the camera. It would probably work nicely if you lit them differently, perhaps with a green light. When you edit the two pieces together put them ontop of each other and turn the green-light actor/ghost shots to become partially transparent. The result would be the room lines up ontop of each other so the partially transparent layer should disappear while the actor/ghost will not line up ontop of anything so they will not disappear.

If the ghost is going to float and not interact with the environment you can shoot the ghost in front of a greenscreen or in a totally black room so you can remove the background entirely, then make it partially transparent and ontop and it should work.

I've not done this, but it *should* work. The secret as always is experiment with some test shots before you actually intend to do it.

RJSchwarz
San Diego, CA

For the ghost effect, I would put my actor in front of a green screen. In a chrom-keying program, change the background to anything you want and then change the transparancy level of the actor. This could easily be done in Serious Magic's Ultra 2. But as rjschwarz, you should expierment with it a little before you actually shoot the scene.

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