A Bit of Video Magic

Last year, on the 20th of September, I was hired to film a wedding. I decided to share one particular scene from it, due to very intense editing that was involved. There are two videos here of the same shot, the second one being an edited version of the first. I have combined them both into the same video. The scene was of the bride's dance with her father. I used two cameras, one for a close-up and the other was located on the opposite side of the room capturing a far-shot of the same scene. The scene started out with a full sized version of the close-up shot and then divided into a split screen, displaying both the close-up and far-shot simultaneously.

Unfortunately, a waitress crossed in front of the far-shot and stayed with the back of her head to the left side of the screen for the remainder of the shot beginning about 2/3 of the in after the screen splits. So what I basically did is made it look as though the waitress never appeared. The first one called Don & Jenn's Dance is the original shot I created in Adobe After Effects, with the waitress's head blocking the screen. The second one entitled Don & Jenn's Dance (Edited) is my complete revamp of this shot, in which I removed her from the frame.

At first, I was at a loss as to what to do about this issue, along with the bride's grandmother crossing the screen at the same point in time at a further distance. Then it hit me, Osborne Bum! For those of you who know who Osborne Bum is, you may be wondering what he has to do with this. Well, I just applied the same principle that I use to duplicate myself onscreen as the three Bums, called masking, to this problem. The only challenge was that when I film the Bum videos, they are all planned out and set it up accordingly to create the effect I want to achieve. This was not planned at all, so I had to do it from scratch. It was the hardest thing I ever did by far. Nothing before or since has come even close to the nearly two month ordeal it took me to pull this off.

Since I was using the cloning method to resolve this, I kept ending up with two of the groom's mother, Marie, in the background. She happened to be situated standing on the left side of the big wooden pole in the middle of the screen. When the waitress came in, her head covered Marie. This caused a major issue due to the fact that Marie eventually turned to the right and walked behind the pole and came out the other side of it and became visible again. This was a problem because I had just used the clip of her standing next to the pole, prior to the waitress blocking her and layered it over the waitress's head along with earlier and later footage from the shot. As a result, when she walked behind the pole which was no longer visible at this point, I ended up with two Maries. I had basically cloned her in the shot. This hurdle plagued me for days, when I realized that I had to take the footage of her in mid-turn which was still visible and combine it with the clip I had of her from the earlier point. I then key-framed her movement to animate her turning and walking behind the pole. I had to use a still clip of the pole and place it in front of this or else it would appear that she walked in front of the pole and not behind it. She then appeared on the other side.

Luckily the photographer happened to take a picture right in between the initial entrance of the waitress. I used the camera flash as a transition to combine earlier footage of them turning and spliced it with later footage. This was then reversed, slowed down, warped to match the shape of the original and ultimately cross-dissolved back into the correct place in time. Also since there were camera flashes going off, when I replaced the side of the screen that the waitress blocked, it didn't flash since the footage wasn't from the same point in time. Half the screen remained dark. So I had to manually add each flash back that the photographer took. The last thing I did was to add in the reflection of the bride and her father back on the floor. This needed to be done because the floor was for the most part a still clip, from an earlier point in time.

View Video Clip Below: