Welcome back to the apparently never ending stream of Batguy updates. For those of you who are just joining us, you may want to check out the Batguy: Starts Productions Notes, which you can find in the News Archive . What I am starting now is the Batguy: Starts Post-Production Notes. What’s the difference you ask? The Production Notes described the filming process day by day. The Post-Production Notes will cover the editing process Batguy will be going through. Since Post-Production takes a lot longer to accomplish, I will be dividing this section up into parts, instead of days. Every time I get a chunk of the movie edited, I will post an update or a part. So, we may not see daily updates like the Production Notes. Expect updates every other day or so. Okay, enough rambling, onto Part 1 of the Post-Production Notes.

The first thing I always need to do when finishing a film is to make sure all the footage is present and accounted for. As a director (and in this case, an actor) I have to deal with a lot of stuff during filming. So, sometimes I forget to film certain shots. Even with a crew present (and I had a very good one this time) it can be hard to keep track of things. Luckily, with the help of a schedule and marking off scenes as I went a long, all the scenes were filmed. No pickup shots were needed, which is great since 70% of the movie was chromo keyed and setting the green screen up for one shot would have been a pain in the ass.

I have a certain process when editing films. First, I put all the footage together. Next, I go through all the footage again and do all the extensive editing (such as chromo keying, adding in particle effects, etc). And finally, I add all the sound effects, music, text, and transitions in. So once I pieced all the footage together, I went back to first scene and started the process of chromo keying. For those of you who don’t know, chromo keying is the process of removing a color (usually green or blue) from the video and replacing it with an image or video clip.

This is the first scene that needed to be chromo keyed. In this case, the neon green paper will be removed and replaced with something else.

What was put in place of that green screen was actually a chromo keyed scene of Batguy jumping down. Once the green screen was taken out, I put a red sky as the background, followed by the chromo keyed scene of Batguy landing, and in front of that is a heavily alphaed glass to make it look like a window. I did the remaining shots in this scene like this too. The end result turned out pretty good.

Batguy (Chad Troftgruben) loses his balance.

After finishing up the commissioner scene, I moved onto Bryce Wade Manor. In this scene Bryce Wade (Batguy’s alter ego) looks out the window to see the Batguy signal. This was not chromo keyed though, a process called garbage matting was used instead. Garbage matting is when you draw out an area you want removed from the video. This is usually easy when there is no movement in front of the garbage matted area. But, when movement is present, I have to go in frame by frame to move the garbage matte to compensate. This can be a long and tedious process. But, if it’s done right, the end result is worth it.

Bryce Wade (Chad Troftgruben) looks at the Guy Signal

And this wraps up Part 1 of the Batguy: Starts Post Production Notes. In Part 2 we will see the editing process of the Guy Cave.

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