It’s been a very busy time for me. With Roomies now getting ready to go into production and like a million other things, I’ve had very little time to do things such as write the post-production notes I promised you all. But now, the Batguy: Starts Post-Production Notes are back! A lot of work has actually been done (even if I haven’t written about it) and I hope to have this movie finished by the time Roomies enters production. So, here is Part 3!

First, for those of you who don’t know, I am now using new software to chromo key. This new software has opened up many doors and makes the final product look much better. For more information, check out theBatguy: Restarts production note.

Now, I started to edit this movie in chronological order, but as time went on, I started to get a little bored with working on the same segment. This is a very dangerous thing, because this can cause people to lose interest and stop working. Well, to counteract this I jumped around, editing different parts of the movie. So in this update, you will see just that.

The first segment I edited was right after the Guy Cave. The City Streets scene is when Batguy drives to the Guy signal that is hailing him. This called for a wide variety of stuff. Exterior shots of the Guy Mobile, interior shots of Batguy in the driver seat, a civilian almost getting run over, etc. When shooting the exterior of the Guy Mobile, we used a toy car and shot it on a green screen. When in editing, I removed the green screen, and constructed a road for it to drive on.

The Guy Mobile hauls ass through the city.

For the interior shots, we slapped a green screen on the driver side window of my car. I then removed the green and replaced it with a background of the city.

Batguy in his Guy Mobile.

Next came the civilian shot. This one required a bit of work. A lot of garbage matting was needed to get rid of the green around the actor. I then moved the actor downward so her legs were off the screen. Before with her legs on the screen it looked a little odd (yes, even for this movie).

On noes! Will she get hit?!

After these shots is when I decided to switch to a different part of the movie to edit. I decided to get away from all this pain in the ass green screening and try editing a non-green screened segment (which is hard because like 80% of this movie needs to be chromo keyed). So I decided to edit the Duct Man’s Lair scene. In this scene Duct Man captures Batguy and reveals his diabolical plot. For the most part, all the cuts worked out nicely.

Batguy (Chad Troftgruben) awakens to find himself duct taped to a chair.

I then started working on the final battle scene. I experimented with different things, such as keying out the sky. I’m still not sure if this will be the final route yet, since some shots just don’t seem to work with this technique. But some shots look good, like the example below.

Duct Man (Frank Hurt) and his minions… and a red sky!

I then jumped again to another scene! This time the parking lot scene where the Prankster calls Batguy. This one required some work (more then I first thought anyway). I had to mirror the Prankster (he was on the wrong side), key out the Prankster’s green background, key out the sky for Batguy, put the two clips side by side then speed the video up or down accordingly so the dialogue between the two would stay in sync. The end result was pretty good!

Batguy and the Prankster chat about stuff and stuff.

Well, that’s it for today. Stay tuned for Part 4 of the Batguy: Starts Post-Production Notes!

---