Lost Video Island

[alyssap22]

In AU videos how do you make really good manips? This is probably an impossible question but I thought I would ask anyways.

I am making some Sawyer & Claire videos and obviously they do not have many scenes together.

Any advice on how to make the "fake scenes" , manips, believeable?

Thanls!
-Alyssa

[soapbubbles511]

There's actually a variety of things you can do to make AU vids work..

there's masking so that they actually appear to be in the same frame when they're not... and there's a nice tutorial here:
http://lostvideo.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=13712

and then there are a bunch of little things to just pay attention to.. like location, time of day, brightness etc of the clips that seem obvious to me but I've seen many an AU vid killed by these kinds of things....like if you want to create a scene of Conmama talking if Sawyer's on the beach, Claire should be on the beach too... it's kind of distracting if Sawyer's clearly on the beach and Claire is off in the middle of the jungle... or its nighttime for Sawyer but the sun's shining for Claire... and also be aware of who else is really in the scenes... from certain angles Charlie can pass for Sawyer... Juliet can pass for Claire... but if you can see all Kate's dark hair in Sawyer's scene its not going to pass for Claire

and reaction shots are always effective... Sawyer calls out for Claire, she turns around... Claire yells at Sawyer, he looks hurt, yells back whatever... making them look like they're reacting to each other even if they weren't really in the scene together can make a scene look legit

and audio manips are a huge pain but if done right can be very very effective... if you can create a conversation that sounds like it really happened... but with audio you have to pay attention to things like tone of voice, background noise, loudness of both speakers and how they match up with the clips
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[alyssap22]

[soapbubbles511]

You're welcome

and I'd definitely zoom in on Sawyer a little bit, especially if its only a bit of Kate and can be easily hidden by a little zooming... and this may be getting into a personal preference thing but in general I don't like it when people zoom in too much.. like if Kate was taking up half the screen so you zoomed in really really close to Sawyer to hide it... sometimes it can be done to both sides (Sawyer and Claire) so it looks like an artistic choice... but a lot of times it just looks like you're hiding something (which you are, but works better if its not obvious you're trying to hide something, lol)
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