I left few words out of my post. It was supposed to read: It would be a split. Unless the characters played by the same actor cross each other, there’s no need for a matte.
Trek guest actors in maybe surprising roles
- Thread starter Maurice
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Generally I'd agree, but as I said, it would have to be an exceptionally good split screen by 1960s sitcom standards to be that seamless. And there is a faint white outline around "Johann"'s back that's consistent with a matte. Generalized assumptions are never as good as examining the actual evidence in a specific case, since exceptions do happen. So I remain noncommittal. It could have been done either way.
And then there's "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"
I just watched the two scenes with Johann and Herman in shot, played by Gwynn, both on Roku and YouTube. There's no faint "white outline" that I can see, just some compression noise on the latter. It looks like a bog standard split screen as used since the silent era, and, since there's no "crossing" in either shot, there'd be zip reason to go to the higher cost and trouble of a matte. The Patty Duke Show routinely did it as well and better than this.
As I have said, I agree a split screen is more likely. I just think there's a small chance it might have been something else, though obviously I could be wrong about that. In the absence of further evidence, there's no way to settle it definitively and no point in debating it further. I did a brief search to see if I could find an article or interview discussing how the shot was actually done, but I had no luck.
Just spotted Shatner
on an episode of 'psych'.
as the bad guy. My, he got heavy in the '00s
The Patty Duke Show, I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched have entered the chat.
They were pretty good at split screens in '66.
The Twilight Zone used split screen for the fourth season episode "In His Image" in 1963.
A next to zero chance. It's so obviously a split screen, it'd be a waste of time to explain why it isn't anything else, so two words will suffice:
- budget
- complexity
There's an anecdote from "The Enemy Within" where young DP Jerry Finnerman didn't know how to create the Patty Duke style split screen for Kirk, so during the run-up to the episode, he called an old mentor at some other studio, probably Fox, and got an informal tutorial. It shows up in Kirk's bedside scene in Sickbay.
I can't remember where I picked this up. Maybe it was Star Trek Memories (Shatner) or Inside Star Trek (Justman, Solow).
Later in "I, Mudd" he managed what looks like a triple play, but I'm sure it's just a two-way shot that splits off center, and the middle Stella is a body double:
You mentioned a situation where the dual-role actor has to cross in front of self. The Parent Trap did a fantastic job of that using 1998 technology, a lot of computers. I love that movie.
Pretty certain the split is right down the edge of the short wall to the right of the throne, just in front of right-side Stella. Look at the shadows on the floor in line with the wall just ahead of her toes.
Good spotting. They had a stand-in on the right so there'd be a shadow, which shows care was taken, but the shadow doesn't match. Maybe they only had two of those big dresses; the right-side stand-in was wearing trousers.
To me this illustrates how hard it is to get things perfect when you're making a show, and it was even harder during the analog film era with no instant playback.
Fortunately, the illusion is convincing and no one watching the show is scrutinizing the shadows on the floor. Good enough is, well, good enough.
Speak for yourself (he says, after the tenth rewatch)!
If you think about it, the Parent Trap from 1961 probably did more with split screen and camera tricks to create the illusion of twin Haley Mills without the aid of computers.
It was already an old technique by that point. I used to think that TNG: "Datalore" was innovative in doing a split-screen shot of Lore putting a glass down and Data picking it up (or was it vice-versa?), but since then I've seen similar "interactive" split screen shots done in 1940s-50s productions.
Using twins was so much easier, like Leslie and Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2.
