New twist on a ghostly look

R

Rigby

Active member
I'm looking for a new twist on a ghostly appearance. I'm currently working on a project that requires one of the charcters to turn from a living person to a ghost in one shot. I've already done all of the typical tricks ( opacity and glow) and it looks good, but it's so "blah".

Anybody have any ideas or tricks to make the effect more interesting? My ghost look really needs to be spiced up a bit. The stranger the better. Thank you.
 
You may want to consider using some particle systems to generate some vapor/smoke based masks which you can then use to dynamicly alter aspects of your comp like opacity, glow and color. Combined with gradients/ramps you can do things like have the torso and lower be more vaporous than the head & shoulders.

You can also take this a step further by roto'ing particle emmiters onto your ghosts (maybe even just the head and shoulders) so they have a whispy vapor trail as they move.
 
You can shoot the actor with black background, then you use any effect that removes all the black, like luma key or blending mode screen/lighting

Remove the color, and put alittle blue/cyan with Color Balance. And duplicate the clip and put Blur on the clip below. I got a nice ghost-effect with this one. I may show you my test video if you want.
 
Melwasul

Thanks for the ideas. I will give them a shot. We green screened a lot of the footage and it looks great . And our big ending is a hand that grabs the lead character as blood covers it. (We filmed it upside down and them flipped it) That part looks cool and makes the rest of the ghost stuff look lame. The idea of a vapor trail sounds good. I'll give that a shot.

And Melwasul, I would love to see your footage.

Thanks again.
 
Maybe also play with some distortions. Duplicate your ghost layer, distort him all around, drop the opacity way down, then play with blending modes. Might give a little extra weirdness to it.
 
Not totally sure if this is the kind of thing you're after but it might be relevent. This is just an effect i was testing for fun. Let me know if you want help with it.

freaky ghost effect
 
Here is a footage where I shot my littlebrother with greenscreen and XL2 for 2 weeks ago. I just changed the effects to ghost-style quick, so it's not perfect ;)
http://www.trianglestudio.net/fx/ghost.mov

edit:
And sorry for the shaking camera. I haven't anything to put under the camera yet.
 
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I agree with Shaw, displacement maps are cool with ghost effects. Use a duplicate of itself to distort the background as it moves etc.
 
Thank you for the great ideas! I think I can take a bit from each look. Melwasul, I like the way your ghost keeps a dark look. (I think I made mine glow a bit much) And Jamesh, I like the tv static look. Very cool. If you could give me an idea to set me on the road to recreating that style; I would appreciate it. Finally, the deplacement maps will actually help me out big time in another part of the film. So I thank you all again.
 
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