Take a look at this 17-second video.
In the video below, the maker of that video explains what is going on, especially at the 1:35 mark. (You can go to ‘Settings’ and turn on the auto-translate mode if you do not speak Portugese.)
But Richard Kaufman claims that this trick dates back 150 years when there was no video or CGI trickery (see also the comments to his post). If that is true, then I have no clue how it was done.
Unless there really are ghosts.
[For some reason, Kaufman’s post has disappeared but the comments to it are still there. But Owlmirror at comment #5 has found a cached page.-MS]
Although it might be possible to do something like this without video trickery, I think this one does use some video tricks. The “Making of” video shows the same exact video (I compared a few frames, and everyone’s position matched exactly) and it clearly had a person holding the sheet.
All you gotta do is film the scene with a tripod with a person under the sheets. Continue filming a bit with no one in the frame so that you have video of the background. Then on the computer, you superimpose the video of the scene on top of the background video -- they will match up exactly since you used a tripod. Manually erase any parts where the ghost actor shows up from the top layer, making the background video show instead. It’s a quick method of erasing things that I’ve used in still photography. The last touch is to add some fake camera shake and make it a bit blurry for that “authentic” feel (and to hide any mistakes.)
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo
https://www.youtube.com/user/CaptainDisillusion/
The link under “(Richard Kaufman) claims” goes to a 404 page currently.
I dug around and found a link to posts on BoingBoing by author, and the only thing showing up for June 6 is a post about orphaned baby elephants.
https://boingboing.net/author/richardkaufman
Did the post just softly and silently vanish?
Did what I should have done before — a Google cache of the page exists.
So does the BoingBoing BBS comments page (distinct from the boingboing main page):
https://bbs.boingboing.net/t/boo-to-you/122476
For some reason, Kaufman’s post has disappeared but the comments to it are still there
Thanks for finding the cached page Owlmirror @#5!