Introduction

It's a magical, mysterious world out there: Harry Potter flying on a turbo broomstick; Gandalf and Frodo going to extremes for a supernatural ring; and the children of the wardrobe sacrificing everything for Narnia. All around us there seem to be more dwarves, giants, faeries, and elves than we can shake a staff at. In this chapter, we're jumping on board the gilded bandwagon as it rolls magically past, by creating our own little magic. Here, we'll fashion out of thin air, or so it seems, an enchanting little elf ready to charm or annoy us (depending on how you feel about elves).

While we could use stage makeup, props, CGI animation, and special effects software to create this effect, who has that kind of time and money? More importantly, it's not necessary. Premiere Elements 3 gives us all of the tools we need to create this effect. The Enchanted Elf effect introduces two techniques in Premiere Elements that once you have them under your belt, you can use them for lots of different projects in different ways.

This chapter introduces you to the "shrinking" power of Premiere Elements. Using this technique, you'll be able to shrink anythingyour dog, your house, your friendsand feature them as elves or fairies, or in miniature "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" situations. Second, this chapter will introduce you to the color-changing abilities of Premiere Elements. We will change a child with normal coloring into a green elf. Again, using this technique, you can change anyone or anythingagain, perhaps your dog or catto any color you want: orange, red, blue, purple.

This chapter also uses a technique introduced earlier in this book, the split screen. Here, we use the split screen to create a multi-dimensional background for the elf to interact with. We are only creating a single split in this project, but in your own projects you could create multiple splits to allow your character to appear to move in front of and behind objects in the background. This is a sophisticated technique that, with a little planning, is relatively easy to pull off.