I may well sound naive here but how do you actually achieve those effects? Is it just a case of adding different clips on overlapping timelines in Vegas ensuring that the background shot (the wendy house) remains constant / still throughout?

Also, did you get the fairy wand effect from within Vegas or is this an effect you have as a plug in?

I wouldn't mind experimenting myself with my three year old!!

Cheers

You've got it. That's exactly what I did.
For much of the film it was a fairly simple case of film Elsie on the left, then film her on the right. Put them on two different tracks and use masking to let only half of the upper track show.
Later it gets a bit more complex - where Elise the fairy wants to play in the house and the other three Elises say "There's no room" I've got four video tracks on the go and, as the Fairy overlaps the others a bit I have to create a bezier mask around her (effectively draw around her - not quite frame by frame but pretty close)
Similarly when she's in front of the still images, but moving, I have to draw around her pretty accurately.
This would not have been nearly as tedious if I'd taken Electronic Image Stabilisation off my camera (as the background image would havematched perfectly and masking needn't have been so accurate). Learn from my mistake!

The stars from the wand and the smoke generated when the nurse etc disappeared (what do you mean you didn't notice?) were both generated, believe it or not, from within Bluff Titler - it has a basic particle generator and it occurred to me I could generate a title with particles, but no actual text! Neat bit of lateral thinking, eh?

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Tim

Thanks for the tips there Tim, much appreciated - will post my efforts here of course when I put them to use myself

And I trust you'll not make the other mistakes I made which resulted from thinking "it's just an experiment so I won't bother with sound, continuity (inc useful cutaways rather than the constant fades to black) etc etc as no-one is going to see it" only to get a blinding performance from the talent.
Looking forward to your results.

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Tim

Stunning, sure it's got some issues in the edit but here the content is king.

I hope you will pull off a making of related to this video, I was trying to work out how some parts were done.

I have done a video with my 4 year old, another failed attempt to do a youtube viral, and I feel your pain when dealing with little ones.

Not sure how long it took you to pull this wonder off mine took 3 days, and daddy was really starting to think never again.

Are you learning vegas Tim, if so how difficult are you finding it?

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Faces are more interesting than places !
http://www.youtube.com/user/leokimvideo

An hour and a half filming, ably assisted by Mrs S as wardrobe mistress.

Much longer than I care to remember to edit.

Always learning, Leo, but I've been using it for a while. I started in May 2005 with Pinnacle Studio, which was a fantastic starting package amd one I would have been happy to use for much longer had it not had the dreadful stability issues (this was version 9.x).
With much help from a fantastic forum, I felt able to push the boundaries well beyond what Pinnacle seemed designed for.

Like many people at the time I jumped ship (in my case, October 2006) for something more stable. Reports at the time suggested Vegas was by far the most stable. I trialed Vegas Movie Studio v6 and whatever Premiere Elements was around at the time. I didn't have any real issueswith either stability wise, but I has a slight preference for the Vegas work flow and quite a large dislike of the comapritively cluttered Premiere interface (I only had one monitor).

I found Vegas very easy to learn (though I did rather jump in at the deep end, using Douglas Spotted Eagle's Vegas 6 Editing Workshop as my guide, but hey, I like reading manuals in bed ***)

A few months later, I upgraded to "full" Vegas 7 (primarily for the velocity envelopes, though in retrospect bezier masks and scripting are much better reasons for "going Pro") and I've upgraded through 8 and 9.

Unlike Pinnacle where I was constantly managing to get more our of a product than it was really intended for, I somethimes feel I haven't scratched the surface of the possibilities within Vegas.

(Copy to Sony Creative Software - please send endorsement cheques to me via the Digital Director website)

(*** No, don't even think about it)

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Tim

Back for another peep at this beautiful video.

And thanks Tim for that detailed reply, exactly how I remember dealing with people in the old video club I was in, answers to questions were always lush and full of detail.

I'm going to attempt a 'ghost' viral video very soon, doing it all in camera via glass reflections and shot under my house, it's a very tricky set up. This will be my second outing with a 4 year old and a video.

I think from memory Mark W work with Vegas has always made me think it's a robust and powerful program, considering I am still on Premiere 6.5 it's going to be a big jump for me, just a historical note I learned on Premiere 4.2 which was bundled with the miro DC30+, bring back any memories.

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Faces are more interesting than places !
http://www.youtube.com/user/leokimvideo

One word "positively charming"...Sorry, thats two!!!

Will this be in VOTM, or am I totally missing something here.

Tim, I have a very interesting story for you..

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Faces are more interesting than places !
http://www.youtube.com/user/leokimvideo

It came joint last in March with a staggering zero votes.
(Just one vote behind something called "Mad Bomber Reloaded")

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Tim