2-Minute Ghost

Yesterday Sarah and I were watching one of those TV programs about ghosts and UFOs. The concept of the show is they find compelling "evidence" of unexplained phenomena (usually a YouTube video) and then they try to explain it. The way they go about it, though, is a little time-consuming and probably quite expensive.

In one case, they were studying a piece of footage shot on the Queen Mary, a huge ship in California. According to the guy who filmed the video, he just happened to set his Flip camera down, didn't realize it was filming, and they caught a vision of a ghost walking down the hall. As soon as I saw it, I knew it was fake, but these guys had to figure out just how in the world was it done?

Before you could say the words "editing effects" they were there trying to re-create how in the world it happened. They filmed someone walking in front of a black sheet. Then they brought in a fog machine and filled the hallway with smoke. Then they brought in a movie projector and projected the image of the walking guy onto the smoke.

Gee, darn, that wasn't it.

So then they took one of those pieces of teleprompter glass politicians use to read their speeches in public and sat that in front of the video camera. Then they projected the image of the walking man onto the glass and the image was captured by the camera.

Success!!

Seriously? This filled up 30 minutes?

As they were revealing their findings, they very quickly, in one throwaway line, said, "We were also able to recreate it with video editing," and then they went on to re-cap the extensive lengths they took to re-create this stunning piece of video.

I don't know how long it took them to set up, shoot, tear down, set up, shoot, and tear down again. I do, however, know this: I shot this video with my Flip cam and got identical results. From the point I started shooting to the time I was finished rendering the final video, it was two and a half minutes.

Next time, guys, just call me first.