Advice Needed on joining two video passes of a head/face

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I am embarking on a short video project and frankly have very little idea how to achieve the results I need. Hopefully someone on here can point me in the right direction…

I need to make a video of somebody crying from one eye. The idea is that the subject be sat still in front of camera and slowly start to sob, but only from one side of the face. The other side should remain entirely calm and show no emotion. I intend to shoot somebody crying and then shoot another pass of them calm and neutral. But I have no idea how to composite these two together. They need to be entirely seamless – the illusion that the subject is expressing strong emotion on just one side of the face is crucial and I need the illusion to be absolutely convincing. All the movements of the face and head should match exactly in the final video. I will instruct the subject to match there movements from the crying pass as much as possible in the neutral pass but there will obviously be mismatches and ironing these discrepancies out will be the real trick I guess.

I work normally on still imagery – photoshop and modo – and have lots of experience in that area but rarely work on moving imagery hence my rather basic question. I have considered simply retouching every single frame manually… but this seems slightly bonkers and there must be a better, more efficient way to do this?

Can someone advise how best to composite the two video passes to form one convincing video piece?

Or if I am going about this in entirely the wrong way let me know.

Many thanks.

[Author]

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