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Something like jibjab.com in real time
Not sure if this was the right place to ask, but was the closest I could find in these forums so here goes.
Where I work one of the things we do is organize all sorts of events, from big concerts to birthday parties, usually focusing on the lighting and video parts of it.
I don’t know how many people are familiar with jibjab.com, basically it’s a website where you can take a face picture (yourself or anyone else), apply it to one of several funny videos they have there, and it’s applied, cutout style, to a character in the videos (for example, the oppa gangnam style video with your face instead of the singer’s face).
A client for a children’s birthday party we are organizing is asking if we can do something like that. Basically he said that he saw a stand in a mall sometime ago (he wrote down the name but lost it) that was just like jibjab, but instead of a single picture it had a camera aiming at your face (which you had to position by sitting down and resting your chin in a small base), and the video showed your face in real time. People paid, sit there, selected a video from several options, watched it and then received it burned on a DVD.
I’ve been trying to find more information on google, so far with no success, so I’m posting here for help if anyone has heard of anything like that, to see if it’s something we can do ourselves with the equipment we already have, or whether is something that can be rented for the party (I’m in Venezuela).
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1 Reply
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There are various ways to do this, but I imagine you want to do it in realtime or as close to realtime as possible.
Anyway, probably the easiest thing to do is to set up a greenscreen wall, with little holes in it or some other arrangement that puts the heads where they need to be in the locked-down camera shot.
You have the background video without the “heads” already prepared, with a lipsynch track. Then you shoot this using a video switcher’s chromakey effect to live-composite the heads onto the video, and record that to a DVD recorder.
To do something a little more time-consuming but with higher “production value”, you will shoot several different pieces that fit to make a complete story with multiple camera shots, and quickly edit them together using cuts-only. This kind of thing, you could turn around in maybe fifteen minutes, including burning a master DVD from the editing timeline.
Your time-savers are to use greenscreen that is live-composited, to arrange the camera shot so all the heads are pre-positioned in the correct relative positions, and to use pre-recorded backgrounds that already have a lipsynch track in them.
A last bit of advice is that guests will not sit still very long at all waiting for technical fussing-around and adjustments. Don’t call them over to do the gag until everything is rock-solid ready to go, don’t keep them waiting long to do anything.
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