The Obi Wan Ghost Effect?

Does anyone know how to do the Obi Wan ghost effect in After Effects? I was thinking of kinda going around the persons body kinda like rotoscoping the sabre with a white blue but was wondering if anyone knows how first to do it the right way.

 

Well, more or less, the effect is just making the person blueish, which can be done with Color Balance, and lowering the opacity, which can be done in the layer settings. Isolating the person from the background is the hard part, and for that, you should probably use a greenscreen.

 

Well, when they did it, they had Alec on a black stage and then I guess you could just use the Screen blending for the layer, make it a little blue. To add the sparkly edges, you would have to expand the persons silluette (I know that's spelled wrong but oh well) and then put that as a different layer where you can make it sparkle. Something like that, I haven't tried it but I doubt that it would be that hard.

 

isnt it pretty much the same effect as holograms except without the scan lines and transmission flickers.

 

I already filmed the scenes months ago and am now in my special effects work am up the ghost part. Are you saying that unless I use a green screen I cant get the same effect? Any ideas for a cool looking alternative?

 

Can you post a frame grab of the footage?

 

It's interesting to compare old ghost vs new ghost effects between the OT and the reworked OT. When they slotted Hayden in at the end of ROTJ, my eyes could be deceiving me but his aura looked kinda like a set of those "marching lights" proceeding in a regular pattern around his body. Alec Guinness, by comparison, both on Dagobah and on Endor, has a much more, well, "organic" look to his aura; the lights are more random and differ a little from time to time. It looks more like miniaturised solar flares, if that makes any sense at all...I suppose they would've done the oldschool effects similar to lightsabers and hand-painted the auras on?

 

What might work is to simply have a background plate of your image, and then film your actor moving and apply the effect to that.
You'd probably have to rotoscope the actor still though, because any effect you apply will appear on the background of his layer.

 

what about a blur on the edges to make the edges softer

 

One way would be to blur your mask - there are many other methods as well and they can all be found in this thread under "Holograms."

Hope that helps!

 

Well..since you've already finished, I dont think this is possible, but a way to make the actor look transparent is to shoot once with the actor, once without him. You can't move the camera at all. The bring the two clips into a new composition and set it to screen. If the lighting is inconsistent, it will make the scene brighter.

 

Well--if you don't actually HAVE/can't shoot a background plate, it's possible you could MAKE one. That is, assuming your shot is a still shot and that the actor that you wish to "ghost" out moves around enough within the frame to allow you to capture all the background elements that you would need behind him at one point or another.

IF this is possible in your shot, what you would need to do is scan through it and find frames
(you may need more than two!) where your "ghost" actor is in enough different places to see all the background elements behind him between all of these isolated frames. Layer these frames on top of each other in a Composition in After Effects. Then, mask the CLEAN background areas using "Add" Masks until the final result in the composition is a clean area of background plate. If there is another actor in the shot, simply mask out their area with a subtraction mask on the plate. Bring your composition with clean background plate section into your shot composition and render it out so that your "ghost" actor is simply absent from the shot and all you have is your other actor if there is one. Go back to your raw footage with both actors after that. This is going to be the most time consuming part by far--you will have to rotoscope around your ghost actor for EVERY frame that you wish the effect to be present using an "Add" mask. You should be left with a composition that is a rotoscoped Alpha channel (meaning just your actor against a totally black background). From this you can apply all the effects you need to get the "ghost" effect and then bring this Alpha channel into your final shot composition.

Some careful frame compositing, hours of rotoscoping, and some simply opacity and color adjustment effects later and BAM--you have yourself a "ghost" actor and a background plate against which to make them shimmer. I hope this is possible for you!

 

This is exactly what I'm doing for Eclipse. It produced the following two shots, which are pretty close to the look I want:

[image=http://petridish.net/pics/23859/teaser3.jpg]

http://phispace.net/spiffyprod/Eclipse/shotb.mov
http://phispace.net/spiffyprod/Eclipse/shotd.mov

-Spiff