Holographic Chess
How It Was Done (by Henry Burrows): I shot the two cantina regulars sitting at an ordinary chess board, pretending to play. The camera was locked into position on its tripod.
Then I shot the two actors who would be playing the parts of the black and white pieces. I could have gone for a full blue or green-screen shot, but as the characters would be almost entirely of one shade, it's not too difficult to extract them digitally from a background of another shade. I shot the white pieces (played by Arron Edwards) in a car park, and the black pieces (played by Jon Hall) against a plain wall in an office. I took care to shoot the actors from the same angle that the camera was to the chessboard in the original shot.
The actors were filmed doing a few simple actions, such as stepping forwards/backwards, fighting, and dying. Once the shots were on my PC, I put together a few mattes for the different positions for both characters - these were applied in Premiere to obscure most of the background.
Then it was simply a case of adding the matted characters onto the board, with transparency options to remove the background and similar colours, and shrinking the images down to place them onto the board. The pieces are different sizes to give some variety to the board, and the ones furthest away are slightly smaller than the ones close-up.
The completed sequence shows the bounty hunter (on the right) moving one of his white pieces forward, followed by his alien opponent moving a black piece forward, then another white move, and finally a shot featuring a white piece killing a black piece and doing a short victory dance!