Clone yourself in an interactive video

This week Articulate challenge is to clone yourself in a video and interview yourself - so as soon as this challenge was announced I knew I was going to create something - it's just too awesome to skip it.

I had a few draft concepts in my head on how to approach this challenge and I have finally come up with an idea allowing me to tell a short story, show some humour and use my After Effects skills. Here are the steps I've taken to complete everything:

• building home recording studio: setting up the camera in the right place, on the optimum height. Making lightning as even as possible.

• recording first role (Joanna on the left)

• recording second role (Joanna holding the book)

• start editing work in Audacity for some noise reduction and cutting voice to parts

• start editing work in After Effects

• ​duplicate the video

• add adjustment layer for brightness

• add masks on both videos so each covered only half of the screen

• add mask feather

• insert audio files

• apply some After Effects magic (now it's a good moment to watch me and my clone in this video as in the next line I'm going to spoil which effects were handy to build this video).

(click image to launch the project)

It's not a coincidence that me and myself are standing next to a fireplace. I wanted to show Joanna, how I use After Effects magic and light up a fire. I found a fire freebie on YouTube which matched my story. Here's link to these guys who shared the file.

The effect I wanted to finish the story with was CC Scatterize and this YouTube tutorial was super helpful to achieve it. As for the first attempt of being a director and actress I'm very pleased with the final effect and can't wait to accept a main role in the next biggest Hollywood hit ;)

As always let me know your thoughts and stay creative.