Inspired by the video for Come Into My World, by Kylie Minogue, I tried to do a match-move effect. Normally this kind of effect is done with motion control cameras. In my case, I had no such equipment. But I did have a stopwatch, a mind for solving problems, and a really nice new fluid-head tripod.

Ceilidh was nice enough to help me out by being my little Kylie stand-in. I had Ceilidh walk around the circle a couple of times, and then through a series of transformations, composites, masks, and time adjustments, was able to make two copies of her walking around together. The idea here was just to see how much work it was to do manually and what the challenges were.

The most uncooperative thing about the production technique was that the trees actually move around in the wind. In Kylie’s video, the set was stationary, and all the moving elements were repeated. In my effect, the largest moving element (the foliage) in the scene was not to be repeated, instead it was supposed to match. This was nearly impossible, and if I had to do it again, I would choose a less breezy day.

Also, I’m learning about lens distortion for another project I’m cooking up, and I think I’ll have to pull out a geometry text book or something because it’s not obvious to me what transformation will make the two videos line up perfectly after they are offset. I’m sure I’ll figure it out, but this project showed that the lens adjustment definitely needs to be performed for a perfect match. I did make several mistakes (gasp!) during production that prevented me from cleaning it up perfectly, most of them timing-related, that could have been easily avoided with a motion-control setup. But considering this was done manually, I think it’s a success for the low-budget approach.