[jyl]

I wonder if anyone can give me some advice on a video project.

My son is doing a dance "Capstone" project. He is choreographing a dance routine consisting of a duet of himself (dancing live) with a "ghost" dancer silhouette (who will be projected on a screen behind him). The ghost will be a video of him: he plans to dress in black, videotape himself dancing the ghost's routine, then invert the video so that the ghost is a white silhouette on a black background.

He saw this ghost dancer technique used by a local dance company that he's done stuff with. They told him about the basic way it was done (videotape dancer dressed in black, then invert video). He's asked me to help him do this.

My problem is that I know zip-nada about video or editing video. I have no special software on the Mac, besides the usual iMovie etc. As far as I know, iMovie won't do special effects. So . . .

- Should I buy video software to do this, and if so then what?

- Should I ask the dance company folks if they'd take a video file and handle the inverting, using whatever software they used? I'd be willing to pay them for their help.

As you can tell, I am rather clueless.