Day 17- Moving peppers ghost illusion

Well I almost gave up on this but finally got it figured out! The concept is to place an actor on a moving cart and have someone behind the actor push the cart toward the glass which will appear to the viewer getting out of the elevator as a ghostly image approaching. Hopefully that makes sense. To review the peppers ghost effect in general you can read the posts on the right that pertain to it. Anyway I got the cheapest dolly I could find and constructed a lean-to extension as you can see. The problem is the wheels swivel and there is no way to get smooth motion of any kind on concrete, so I had to build wooden tracks that were just wide enough for the wheels to be contained where they would stay in 1 position. I tried various configurations of wood before arriving at the solution that worked. The bottom of each track is an 8' 2x4, sides of the track are 2x2's and the actual track itself is about a 1" x 1/2" which raises the wheels just high enough where the metal housing is not impinging the sides, only the wheels themselves are in the track, as shown. I tested the cart motion with my sons standing on there. They are adult size. The actor I intend to use will be smaller. It works great. So if you intend to do this, you can't just put the dolly on the floor and expect it to work. You must build individual tracks to fit just the wheels. The other key element of this is that you need to line the tracks up with the center of the glass so the projection is accurate. I placed a light on the center of the dolly and checked it from the center of the elevator opening to be certain that the image will be seen from that vantage point. Now going forward we have to build an enclosure around the tracks and cover the inside with black sheets. Basically a lot more to do but this was a big help getting this to work properly!