Introduction

From almost the very start of television, the need to have "twins" on the screen who talk alike, walk alike, and sometimes even think alike (what a crazy pair!) has been irresistible. With Premiere Elements 3, splitting the screen into two parts (or, if you are very, very careful, even more than two) is easy to do. The actor and his or her twin (which, of course, is the same actor again, in a second location) can appear to hold a conversation and walk in and out of the scene in a truly convincing way.

One of the nice things about the Multiple You Effect is, while it can be done using a blue- or greenscreen, such equipment is not necessary. If you want to create the illusion of a clone (or a twin), the classic split screen works just fine. With care, you might even be able to finesse triplets (as demonstrated in this chapter). Anything beyond that, such as an army of clones, does require that the actor be filmed in a number of locations against a greenscreen, so that the background can be stripped away (keyed out") and the various "clones" layered one over the other in the scene using the multiple tracks available in Premiere Elements.

In this chapter, however, we are concentrating on the much easier technique of splitting the screen using the Crop effect and creating the illusion of look-alikes engaged in casual conversation. The secret here is to script out the conversation ahead of time so that the "actors" know where to look and what to say. Then, when the scene is pieced together in Premiere Elements, it looks normal and natural as "they" point, talk, and look at each other in the course of conversation.

By the way, for the purposes of instruction, in this chapter we are intentionally violating some basic split screen rules. We are setting our actor against a horizontal plane (he is sitting in various locations on or around a couch) and he is casting a shadow which is cut off sharply at the crop. For your projects (as you'll learn in the section in this chapter, "Understanding the Split Screen Function"), these are definite no-no's. But here, they help demonstrate where each of the cropped clips begin and end. Even with such blatant violations, this effect is so convincing that the "trick," for the most part, still works.