effective character shadows pain

For one of my shots I wanted sweet tooth looking over the graves of his parents. I could have had just a silhouette of the character in the foreground but this would have disrupted the overall composition. I therefore decided to have just the shadow of the character moving across the graves. The only dilemma I had with this was getting the shadow of the character without having the actual layer visible. I could have just drawn it on as a separate layer but I wanted the shadow to move like a time lapse. I ended up spending a long time trying to position the silhouette layer so it was not visible but the shadow was. I did do this eventually after a lot of tinkering with the position and the light settings. To my ultimate irritation I later on figured out that you could turn off the the layer to only show the shadow in the layer properties which would have saved a lot of time. At least I learnt this existed though making the mistake so I will know how to do it if I need to again.