I love creating short films and visual effects, but admittedly it always takes me forever to get the next project completed. Since I somehow enjoy teaching people new things, I have decided to start creating visual effect tutorial videos on my SurfacedStudio YouTube channel as well :)

I don’t consider myself an expert and I often learn tons of new things myself when I’m creating these tutorials, but today I have a very simple visual effect tutorial for all of you: how to create a clone!

Tips & Tricks

It’s easy to create clones of yourself as long as you do not overlap or interact with yourself, but what if you want to? What if you want to hand a package from one clone to the next or have an army of them come up and gather around a table where there is not enough space for all of them to stand side by side? In this case, you have to be a bit smarter about your visual effect!

Overlapping with yourself

Green screening will allow you to (fairly) easily overlap yourself with your clones without having to manually rotoscope them. By using a green screen you end up with footage of your clone on a transparent background and it will be easy to place them in the scene. Incidentally, my next YouTube tutorial will be on green screening hehe :D

Interacting with yourself

This is a tricky one and you will most likely need another person for this. Let’s say you want to hand a package from one clone to the other. As clone 1, act out the scene until the moment you pass on the package. Have someone else take the package from you and pretend to be your clone. Then, have that person pretend to be clone 1 while you act out the part of clone 2, who is receiving the package.
The difficult part will be to ensure the package is in the same position/angle when you hand it over to your clone so you can cut together the footage without any obvious cuts. It is tricky but can be done, I have often seen CG employed as well to ‘smooth’ over the moment of interaction.

Either way, I hope you have fun with the cloning visual effect! There is a lot of great things you can do with it and you sometimes never know whether something will work until you try it! :)