Cloning

After watching Tom Jelfs' "Blend That Film" tutorial:

 ... I decided to try out this technique myself.  I was using Blender 2.61 at the time.  Following Tom's instructions was pretty straightforward.  I wanted to expand on his ideas and branch out a little bit, so instead of creating twins I went for triplets.

Here's the final compositor node layout:

The only real variation between what Tom did and my layout is that he only had one mask to deal with, which he put into a renderlayer which could be used directly in the compositor.  I had three sets of overlaid footage, requiring two masks.  I figured out how to put each mask on a different renderlayer, but only the active renderlayer was updated in the compositor.  There may be a way to make this work correctly, but I didn't find one.  My workaround was to render the masks out into two image sequences, and then feed the mask files back into the compositor.  It worked great, but it did add an extra render step.

There were a couple of lessons learned in this process:

• The lighting between my three takes, even though they were filmed consecutively with minimal interruption, was different enough to be seen in the final composite footage.  I attempted some manual color balancing to minimize the effect, but there was no way to do that effectively for the whole film.  In the future, if I was really concerned about matching the shots, I would be more conscientious about controlling the lighting (i.e. no natural daylight).
• The leather couch in the shot changed its form enough between takes that it was noticeable in the final result.  I would pay closer attention to the setting, and eliminate hard-to-control elements like leather upholstery if they might create inconsistencies between shots.
• I came across a handy application, the AoA Audio Extractor, when finishing the soundtrack.  This software allowed me to pull the audio track off each of my three original clips.  I then dropped each track into an Audacity project and created a single audio file to merge with the frame sequence output by Blender.  The audio and video was combined using VirtualDubMod.

Even though some things could have been done better, I was still very pleased with the final film.  See for yourself!