The Frighteners Ghosts

I like to watch movies that have a lot of supernatural aspects to them. My dad is a big fan of “older” movies or movies of his time so often times I will ask him to pick a good movie out for me to watch due to the fact that I tend to like the same movies as him. This week he happened to pick the movie The Frighteners.

This movie is great if you like supernatural aspects of things or movies where you can figure out how a crime happened. I am going to focus on the super natural part this post. There are quite a few ghosts in this movie. Have you ever wondered how ghosts appear transparent? Or how to get something transparent yourself? So have I. When you go into a word or power point document you can select certain words and change the effects they have such as boldness, color, size, how they stick out or go behind something else. It is generally the same idea with figures in movies.

First you are going to start off by either taking a picture or a video of what you want to be in the background of this frame with the transparent figure in it. If you have solid people or things in the frame, this would be the time to have those features be captured. You are going to want to capture these features just how you want them. In other words, you will basically shoot everything other than the transparent person or thing at this point so you can have the transparent figures places and times already marked out.
If you put place markers during the time when you capture the background so that things look the correct way for the frame then it makes adding the transparent figure in way easier. The next step is to put what you just captured into your video or picture editor. AVS4YOU is free and works well. After you upload this frame you can move onto your transparent frame.


You will shoot whatever you want transparent either on a green screen, if you know how to use one, or in the same frame you captured before, pre-marked. They should be set up and doing all the movements as you want them to do while transparent. After you have filmed this you can go ahead and upload this frame on top of your other one as well. To use an example, in the movie there is a scene at a dinner table with two people and a “ghost”. To get the effect that they are actually talking to each other you would film the solid actors first with all the marks and pauses already put into the scene, then frame the transparent actor with all of the opposite marks and pauses. When you would put these frames together you can crop out all of the transparent scene other than the person or thing and you will still have the background from the other frame. You can do this by clicking layer properties and then snipping out the excess of the frame.

Now that you have the exact parts that you want in this frame, you can now go onto making the person or thing transparent. You will go into layer properties or options again and go to the transparent feature. There should be some kind of range or bar to get from 0% to 100%. The higher the number, the more transparent the object gets. You can choose the transparentness based on your preference. You can also find an effect to make it glow. It all depends on what you want. You can then see the picture or play the video and as long as you know how to align things, you should get the effect of a ghost!

Hopefully that helped J

Dramatic exit-- Director J