making people VANISH

[Hannes Paulsson]

This isn’t a very easy thing to do.
On the top of my head, one way to do this is to first shoot your actor in its place, and then use a set of strings to hang the persons clothes from strings, maybe in front of a greenscreen, and let go of all the strings at the same time. Using the last frame from the video with the actor/actress as a reference to place the clothes in the same place and way as the actor/actress clothes.
And then try to blend these clips and cut from the one with the actor to the one with the clothes falling.
And of course remove all the strings.

[Danny Winn]

One thing you could add to the instructions above would be a light or particle burst right when the clothes falling occurs, that way it would mask the transition between the two and hopefully hide the certain differences between them.

[Jeremy Fabiano]

I would add to this that you’d also want to fade one set into the other even w/ the particles. As in an opacity 100% -> 0% fade on one and vice versa on the other, would smooth the transition out.

If you don’t want to do it that way, another possibility is to go in and mask out all the people (flesh) and leave only the clothes. This will most likely be time consuming, but if you just want the bodies to fade away and no particle burst to cover the transition I believe that should work.

As for the clothes falling, you still might have to resort to the first suggestion – chroma keying some falling clothing held by strings. The only advantage to this method would be not having the particle burst.

An alternative would be to use a 3d program (Maya? Blender[free] ? ) and apply the cloth plugin to it… both equally time consuming.

Good luck to ya..

-Jeremy