What is a composite picture?

Answer 1

Composite images play an essential role in stories where no telesnaps exist or where the authentic material is extremely limited. However, even telesnap reconstructions require composites from time to time. Composite images are pictures that are electronically built up using multiple layers to hopefully produce convincing looking fake pictures. This technique is a computer version of using scissors to cut out parts of one picture to paste into another. It is effectively an electronic version of collage making. Composites are used to supplement a reconstruction wherever authentic visual material is not available. At the basic level, cutting out a character and pasting them into the correct setting for a scene would be a typical scenario for making a composite. This would of course only be necessary if appropriate authentic pictures do not exist for the scene or if we wish to supplement authentic pictures to add variety to the reconstruction. In the more advanced case, composites consist of very many layers, one for each of the independent sources being used. The background layer could be a set, an appropriate costume as one layer, the correct actor's head as another layer, etc, etc. Whenever possible the likeness of the correct actor is used for these types of composites. As a typical example, for the Mission to the Unknown reconstruction, this process was necessary for every single shot featuring the main cast as no telesnaps or authentic pictures of them survive at all. The composites use whatever source material is suitable in order to represent the pictures that would have originally be shown on screen during transmission. The source material can come from a variety of different places depending on what is available and what can been found and deemed appropriate for each episode.