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Welcome to part 2 of the Batguy: Starts Post-Production Notes. At last, I have finally updated! See, along with Batguy: Starts, I am currently working on another production, a new cartoon for my Lilredhead Productions site. So, I have been very busy lately. Also, the cave scene (which I will be discussing today) was giving me some problems, which is why it took me longer to edit. Well, enough explaining, onto the update! Like Batman, Batguy has a cave where he hangs out in. Since there are no caves around Dickinson, North Dakota, we couldn’t film on location. Also, since space is really limited at our university, we couldn’t construct a set. The only option left was to chromo key the entire scene. For the most part, this was easy to edit. However, there were some points where it got difficult and time consuming. I hit Google and did a mass search for cave images. Once obtaining the ones I wanted, I went into Photoshop and tweaked with them, changed the color, added stuff to them, etc. I then started editing one shot at a time. The first shot is when Bryce Wade (Chad Troftgruben) is walking down a hallway removing his shirt (because he’s getting ready to put his Batguy uniform on). For the most part the chromo key worked. However, Bryce Wade’s legs had a weird faded look to them. So I darkened the video to hide this. This was also beneficial to the atmosphere though, since it’s supposed to take place in a dark cave. 
Bryce Wade (Chad Troftgruben) shows off his sexy body. The next shot required a little more work. Millfred (Josh Nichols), Bryce’s butler, hands Bryce his costume. The thing is, Millfred was not supposed to be shown, but the person manning the camera guy got Josh Nichols in frame. I had to crop him out of the video, so only his arm was shown. When chromo keying, this made the video look a little grainy. However, it’s the best I could do. 
The video looks a little grainy. However, it’s not too terrible. Oh and in my defense, I am sticking out my gut there, so I’m actually not THAT fat... ![]() The next few shots were easy and required little work. The shot when Bryce puts on his mask required some garbage matting (the process of eliminating selected pieces of video that did not fully chromo key), but in the end, it looked pretty good. 
Bryce Wade (Chad Troftgruben) puts on the Batguy mask. The last shot of the Guy Cave is the one that took me the longest to edit. What happens in this shot is Batguy starts walking to his Guy Mobile, but is stopped by his butler Millfred. This may sound simple, but while this is all going on, the Guy Mobile is rising on a platform in the background. Just as a reminder, we shot the toy Guy Mobile in front of the green screen, so I was able to chromo key it into the cave. It took me a little while to figure out how I wanted to do it. First, I took an image of a tunnel and put a hole in it’s ground. I then split the image in half horizontally. I imported both pieces into my chromo key program. The first layer was a metal panel that comes up through the hole. The second layer was the top of the tunnel. On top of the metal plate is the rotating Guy Mobile clip, which is the third layer. After that I inserted the bottom half of the tunnel image. And the last layer was the actual footage of Batguy walking towards the car. Hard to visualize? You bet it was. Here’s the image that will hopefully explain it better. 
This picture probably doesn’t help, does it? The actual hole is not shown due to the metal plate and car covering it in this particular frame. And that ends the Guy Cave scene. In the next update I will cover the city street shots of the Guy Mobile driving. See you then! |
