Need help on freeze frame / flow mo whatever

i think we become so amazed with the digitally done stuff just because it is digital. i mean, in matrix, the freezes really look digital. kinda stiff with a (i can't even put my finger on what it really is) 2d-ish look to it.

try this. go into your bathroom and get in front of the mirror. freeze, then rotate around on your feet so you just see your upper body moving. kinda look with your eyes. it's uncanny how cool you can make it look. it looks nearly as good as the digital stuff.

First I set the camera on a tripod and "locked it down" (meaning I tightened all the pivot & tilt screws sure there was no way for it to accidentally move, or shift.)

Next I videotaped the scene I want to have frozen. In my case I just moved a round with a fake knife in hand as if i was going to attack someone, and after a few seconds I lunged forward with the knife. (noone was in the way, and this is the part I wanted frozen.

Next, without moving the camera (to play it safe, I didn't even touch the camera) I videotaped the scene where I'd be standing in front of my "evil" self. I made sure to watch where I was standing so that I could overlap the two scenes in motion without crossing them. Once I knew I had taped enough for the attack, I then walked around the room, careful to step "behind" the place I was going to have the frozen "evil self"

(I know this is confusing, but bare with me.)

I digitized both scenes, and in Premiere selected a frame in the first movie that showed me lunging with the knife. I saved that frame as a pict file and brought it into Photoshop.

In Photoshop I simply selected all the parts that I wanted to be able to "go behind" and cut those out as a separate layer.

Back in Premiere I setup the "bad guy" footage as the background layer, then I put the "good guy footage as the foreground layer and created a split screen between them, to make it look like I was in the same scene twice. At the point where I wanted the action to freeze, I dropped in the pict image of just my cutout as the top layer and stopped the split screen. Since it was the same room and the same camera angle, the background will look no different. When I was shown walking around the room, it looked like I was walking behind my frozen evil self. If you wanted multiple layers of frozen people (say a few in the background and a few in the foreground), you would need more layers, and then you'd need a bluescreen.

if the cam perpective does not change, you could basically employ the same concept if you were to take a cardboard stand up of darth vader and walk around him like he's frozen and talk trash. you could dress up like han solo.
"who's laughin' now vader?! definitely not you!"

there's nothing like bad humor...

Thats a really cool method. Is there a webpage or something that explaines how to do it in more detail? Im new to this premier and photoshop stuff and so I dont understand many of the things you say. But I would realy like to learn to do this effect.

A great website to visit is www.dv.com/magazine/index.html.
Its the website for DV magazine. There are some great tutorials on there for video compositing, using Adobe products. You may also want to try www.adobe.com. I don't think they have any tutorials on there, but they may have additional articles about using Photoshop & Premiere. Another option is taking a look at the Adobe classrooms in a book for Premiere or Photoshop. They run about 50 bucks, I think, but they give you a good idea of how to use the applications. If you start with a basic knowledge, and just experiment, you'll figure out tricks that work for you.

To simplify my method, think of it as putting titles over a video. When you put titles on, its like putting a cutout of a still image over your video. In our case, instead of letters we're using a cutout of a human being (kind of a digital version of the Darth Vader cutout mentioned earlier.). Its the same concept either way.