For a while I was in the habit of growing a beard in the wintertime. One year I got the idea to shoot a video where I played two characters, one before I shaved and one after. I decided to do a father/son scenario where their resemblance was a factor. After a little noodling I came up with the plot line with the added wrinkle that the son would dress up to impersonate the father at one point.

For this one I couldn't rely on my typical practice of improvising the dialog, or writing it spontaneously on the spot. Every line had to be scripted out ahead of time so that I could shoot each character in their entirety and edit it into a cohesive conversation after the fact.

Shooting it was not easy. As usual, I didn't have a collaborator, so I had to do this entirely on my own. It would have helped immensely to have a stand-in reciting the other character's dialog so that I could interact with them as I recited my own lines, making it come off more naturally. As it was I needed to recite each line independently. It would also have served to make sure I didn't miss any part of the dialog, which I did. If you look closely you can see a dissolve edit where the father character responds to a line that the son character never delivers.

I shot the father first, with an unruly beard and unkempt hair. Then I trimmed the beard and combed my hair for when the son was impersonating the father. Finally I gave myself a close shave, got a short haircut, and dyed the gray out of the hair and eyebrows to look as young as possible. I shot each and every line of both characters three times, one from a distance, one intermediate, and the other close up so that I could pick and choose when I did the final edit.

In terms of creating two distinct and believable characters engaged in an entertaining conversation, I think this piece was a success, but it was deeply flawed in other ways. First of all my acting suffered from not having another person to interact with. Many of the lines come off as plastic and unconvincing. There is a continuity error when the father delivers the "seal the deal" line and you can see that the son has already emptied his pockets onto the kitchen table, as well as my laptop in the background. And finally, the shots were generally composed poorly. Typically one character should be looking right-to-left and the other left-to-right to make it look like they're facing each other, but the limited space in my little house constrained my ability to place the camera where I wanted. Not being able to see myself in the shot impaired my ability to notice this issue. Finally, some of the shots were framed poorly with the character's head getting cut off. This was another complication of having to be my own cameraman.

Overall I was relatively happy with the final product. Despite the flaws I thought it was a fun piece. It was not good enough to be submitted to a film festival, but that wasn't the point. I just wanted to do something fun that I could put out there. But it wound up being a lot of work. It was the first time in several years that I had taken the time to produce a video, and by the time I was done I was not inspired to go to all that trouble again.