Historical Productions

PART EIGHT - POST-PRODUCTION

Director David Burns, with the task of editing both the video and the audio together for the film, explains the difficulties of finishing on a tight schedule. “Post-production can be quite a nightmare. I love the editing process, it’s a lot of fun. It’s hands on. You’re actually doing the work of piecing the film together scene by scene. Editing the audio for the film is not a bad task, but the technical issues that I had a lot of problems with was that sound mixing is incredibly difficult. Mixing the audio was well out of my league, so we had to send out for a professional to do the final mixing for the film. We found a wonderful person, Dedric Terry, whose done a wonderful job with the mixing and I’m glad that we decided to hire out the job to him. I will never attempt audio mixing myself again. It’s a job that should be left to the professionals. There’s a lot more to post-production than a lot of people realize. It is what takes the majority of the time in making your film. If everyone would see just what a filmmaker has to go through in post-production, they would appreciate films a lot more than they do.”

The task of creating the special effects and CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) was left in the hands of producer and acting Visual FX Supervisor Wayne Whited, who explains here the task of bringing what they were unable to record on film to life.

“Unless you’ve had hundreds of hours of training, you can not begin to understand the complexity and difficulty of trying to master the art of CGI. I’m still a beginner when it comes to the realm of computer wizardry. I’m definitely no Industrial Light and Magic. But there were a few shots that I was determined to get to the screen that would require the use of computer trickery to accomplish. To accomplish that, I decided to limit myself to simplify matters by creating everything I was trying to do over two programs – Lightwave 3D Professional for the CGI and Adobe After Effects Professional for the compositing and titling.

The first shots that I concentrated on were the train shots that were recorded back in February. I started with these as they looked to be the easiest of the shots that I had to create, simply replacing the green-screen with the footage of moving background that David and I had shot back in November 2006 with me pointing the camera out the window of his car. It was doing these shots that I learned that even the simplest looking shots can be deceiving. I ended up doing this twice, not that there was anything wrong with the first attempt, but after a few months of getting to know the program I realized that I could go back and redo the early FX on these shots to make them look better. The second time around I was able to keep the reflections of the people on the window, namely Jack’s reflection, to give it a more realistic look to the scene. This is something that I was unable to do the first time.

After completing the window shots, I had to concentrate on the shot filmed at the back of the train, where Johnny is standing watching the train speed down the track. Again this looked like a simple green-screen shot to replace with footage shot in Indiana. I put this shot off until nearly last, and we didn’t record the moving background until very late in September. When I began to composite the two shots together, I discovered that the lighting on the green-screen was bed, and created a lot of “shadow artifact”, I had to go in frame by frame to pain this out. Fortunately the shot only lasts three seconds, and I was able to finish this in record time.

With those shots finished, my attention turned to enhancing the battle footage that was shot during the Snodgrass Hill filming dates. Many of the shots lacked punch, such as bullet hits, smoke or explosions. Especially the shot when Johnny is knocked down just before being attacked by the Confederate colonel. These were probably the easiest of all the CGI to complete, and a real explosion filmed in front of a blue-screen was used to enhance the shots. Many of the bullet hits and extra debris won’t even be noticed by most viewers, because they happen so fast. But if you were to compare the two versions of the shots together, you’d notice them.

There were two shots that I thought needed a more ‘gory’ enhancement – the shot of the third flag bearer getting shot and the one of Johnny being shot in the ear. A little CGI blood splatter was added to the scenes. This is very apparent in the flag bearer as the splat is huge, but with Johnny’s shot it happens so fast and small that it’s hard to see, but it’s there and helps to draw the attention to his ear when he’s hit.

Next up was the scene with the explosion in the field that was filmed that Saturday evening in September. This was one of the more difficult shots to complete, because the explosion needed to hit the ground behind Johnny and the officers standing in the field. I used a process the visual effect industry calls ‘rotoscoping’, which is a process of tracing over the live action footage frame by frame to separate the sections of the film that is needed (or in my case, not needed). It’s the same process used for years in Disney animation, and also to create the lightsaber effects in the ‘Star Wars’ films. Moving one frame at a time, I had to carefully trace around the outline of each officer in the field to separate him from the background, and then afterwards I could insert the explosion into the footage making it look like the blast was behind the men standing there. I spent nearly three months working on this scene. I’m pretty happy with it, but I still think a few months more work would have improved it. It did give me a quick and much needed lesson on rotoscoping, which I would use later in other shots with greater effect.

The last remaining shots that were done for the film were actually the most complex, but really not the hardest. We had two scenes, one showing a shot of Camp Dennison and an other showing New York City during the Civil War. These would be matte paintings, created completely on the computer using a mixture of Lightwave 3D and After Effects. We had filmed five green-screen shots back in February right after the train scenes where I had various reenactors walk around or stand on the greenscreen and I filmed them. These would be used as the people moving around in the mattes, do give the paintings a sense of perspective and life. These worked well, but proved to be very troublesome as the lighting was too bright in spots and would obscure the green-screen at times.

I spent nearly three months putting together the CGI matte paintings of the two locations, and to make my work easier I cheated in a few areas and used photographs taken in various parks and fields for the sections of grass and the trees that you see in the shots. But the buildings, tents, and statues you see had to be created from scratch.

For the Camp Dennison shot, I used a field near Miamisburg, the town where I live, as the background and sky plates used. The field I chose had a huge power line running through the shot, so my first job was to paint it out to get rid of it. Second, I created the tents in Lightwave basing their look on tents from photographs I had taken nearly ten years ago at the Antietam 1997 reenactment. The two trees in the foreground were from photographs of a nearby park. As an added background touch, a flag blowing in the wind was added to the camp. The final stage was to composite the live action footage by rotoscoping each frame of the film and shrinking the shot to fit the perspective of the matte.

The shot I’m most impressed with is the New York City scene. Again I used a photograph of a field to create the grass in the shot, and various photos of trees were also used as background. The tents were from a photograph taken at this year’s Granville event. Using a sketch created of Union Square in New York City from a wartime Harper’s Weekly, I created in Lightwave the buildings to match exactly as well as the statue. Two flags were added into the shot waving in the wind, one on top of the hotel building, and another on the statue. I placed the light source of the shot behind the flag to show the sun in the sky as if it was nearing late afternoon. Finally, the last step was to composite the live action footage the same way I did with the Camp Dennison shots, by rotoscoping every frame into the scene. I had a little difficulty with the bottom of one ladies’ dress, as she walks off of screen just slightly near the middle of the shot. The flowers along the sidewalk were added as a ‘cheat’ to cover up this small error.

Another shot that I wanted to enhance was a shot of Johnny looking out of the window of the train car. Since all train scenes had to be shot inside the building, I wanted to give the shot a feel of movement, as if the train was moving down the track instead of just sitting still. This proved to be easier than I had originally anticipated. First the project was inputted into Adobe After Effects and layered into two separate sections, the window and the side of the car. By rotoscoping around the edge of the window, I inserted the reflection of sunset clouds moving past, to give the shot it’s sense of movement. I simply used a film shot of clouds obtained from a stock footage source and inserted it into the rotoscoped areas that were still exposed and turned down the opacity of the footage to about 25%. Next, a solid black layer was added at an opacity of 30% and animated to wash over the shot at a fast rate to create shadows of buildings as the train passes by. Then, I created a few bumps on the track to take out the smoothness of the shot and show the train bouncing down the track by just adjusting the position of the film for a frame in selected spots. After a total adjustment of the color levels of all layers, the shot was finished.

One scene that was filmed and completed, but not used in the film, was the often spoke about shot of Johnny watching the city of Atlanta burn. I was never happy with this shot and I hope to be able to go back and redo this visual effect for the DVD release of the film. However, one version was created using the green-screen footage shot in December/ I used a photograph of a field landscape that I had taken in Virginia on Sailor’s Creek Battlefield as the backdrop, lowering down the lighting and replacing the sky with a starry horizon to create the illusion of nighttime. Then, pre-shot stock footage of flames burning were inserted between the layers to show the fire in the background, and an incandescent glow created to create the scale of the scene. While it’s not a bad effort in whole, the shot isn’t exactly how I had pictured it and I feel the flames are just too big at times, as if Johnny’s watching a huge forest wildfire rather than something that’s far off in the distance.

One of the biggest shots to be abandoned for the film was the two shots of the train approaching the train station and moving past that were to be used in two separate times in the film. I had begun work back in February on creating an totally CGI 1860s period train to use in both the shots. I began the compositing work on both the scenes, and even began the layering process of inserting the train into the shots. But what needed to be understood is that the art of CGI is an incredibly difficult and time-consuming process that takes an enormous amount of talent and creative know-how, not to mention an intimate knowledge of the workings of the program you’re using, which in my case was Lightwave #D Professional. This same work which I was undertaking on my own is usually done using dozens of people, and unfortunately when we began to roll into September I realized that there would be no way I would be able to complete the shots satisfactory by the October due date for the film. It’s sad that I had to abandoned the shots, as they would have looked incredible in the film and even now, with the film finished, I still continue to work on them with the hopes of completing them in time for the DVD release.

Another visual effect shot that I had worked on and really wanted to get into the film was the removal of the door hinge in the recruiting office scenes. On the shots where Johnny and his friend run up to the door of the building to look at the posters, you can see a very modern hinge at the top of the door. I had tried to carefully remove the hinge from the shot, which required for me to take every frame of the three angles, one by one, and send them over into Photoshop where I could paint out the hinge. Then, the frame would be inputted into After Effects and the scene reassembled there. I was having great success with the shots, but it was an incredibly time-consuming process and there were nearly 1000 frames that had to be individually painted and replaced. When I finished, which was sometime in September and only a few weeks before the footage was due, I noticed that there were problems with some of the shadowing in the shots around the areas where I had altered. The moving shadows tended to attract you eye line away from the actors in the shot, and since this was a visual effect that I didn’t want people to notice a problem of this nature can’t be tolerated. I’m hoping to have this problem corrected for us to be able to replace the shots in the near future.”

The film was completed on October 25th, 2007 a mere two weeks before the premiere in Newark, Ohio. Clocking in at just a few minutes over an hour, it is the achievement of nearly two and a half years of hard work and dedication from the producers. Their dreams of bringing young Johnny Clem’s story to the big screen accomplished, the filmmakers look back at the finished end product they had put so much time and effort into:

“The film turned out a lot better than I though was possible,” states director David Burns. “The shots that I had argued that we would be able to get, we got, and they turned out better than I had thought they would. The epic battle scenes we filmed at the reenactments matches seamlessly with the shots we filmed and set up on our own sets. Wayne and I were able to do what we originally set out to do and much, much more."

“I am very pleased with the film.” Producer Wayne Whited looks back at their creation. “We managed to do everything that we had wanted to do, and more. We were beginners in the art of independent production when we first entered the project back in 2005, and I was worried that we wouldn’t be able to handle the pressures and time restraints that this type of filmmaking brings. But we handled every problem like experts who had been doing this for a very long time. We discovered that if we put our heads together, we can accomplish anything we want."

Director David Burns, and his final thoughts for the production of “Johnny”:

“I really hope this film educates the film on Johnny’s story and who he was. I hope it opens up their eyes to what our ancestors did for us. I hope that in some way this helps to preserve Johnny’s history, even if it is to just save anything that was Johnny’s. For the people in the city of Newark, Ohio and for anyone in our nation, I hope it brings back some of the pride missing in their city and their country for this hero that had grown up so many years ago. The history he had with the military is an incredible story, and I hope people can bring out of this film a little of the fascination that I had when I first heard of the story. I hope this opens up eyes across the country to see this boy who ran away from home to fight in a war to preserve what we take for granted today.”



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	PART EIGHT - POST-PRODUCTION Director David Burns, with the task of editing both the video and the audio together for the film, explains the difficulties of finishing on a tight schedule. “Post-production can be quite a nightmare. I love the editing process, it’s a lot of fun. It’s hands on. You’re actually doing the work of piecing the film together scene by scene. Editing the audio for the film is not a bad task, but the technical issues that I had a lot of problems with was that sound mixing is incredibly difficult. Mixing the audio was well out of my league, so we had to send out for a professional to do the final mixing for the film. We found a wonderful person, Dedric Terry, whose done a wonderful job with the mixing and I’m glad that we decided to hire out the job to him. I will never attempt audio mixing myself again. It’s a job that should be left to the professionals. There’s a lot more to post-production than a lot of people realize. It is what takes the majority of the time in making your film. If everyone would see just what a filmmaker has to go through in post-production, they would appreciate films a lot more than they do.” The task of creating the special effects and CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) was left in the hands of producer and acting Visual FX Supervisor Wayne Whited, who explains here the task of bringing what they were unable to record on film to life. “Unless you’ve had hundreds of hours of training, you can not begin to understand the complexity and difficulty of trying to master the art of CGI. I’m still a beginner when it comes to the realm of computer wizardry. I’m definitely no Industrial Light and Magic. But there were a few shots that I was determined to get to the screen that would require the use of computer trickery to accomplish. To accomplish that, I decided to limit myself to simplify matters by creating everything I was trying to do over two programs – Lightwave 3D Professional for the CGI and Adobe After Effects Professional for the compositing and titling. The first shots that I concentrated on were the train shots that were recorded back in February. I started with these as they looked to be the easiest of the shots that I had to create, simply replacing the green-screen with the footage of moving background that David and I had shot back in November 2006 with me pointing the camera out the window of his car. It was doing these shots that I learned that even the simplest looking shots can be deceiving. I ended up doing this twice, not that there was anything wrong with the first attempt, but after a few months of getting to know the program I realized that I could go back and redo the early FX on these shots to make them look better. The second time around I was able to keep the reflections of the people on the window, namely Jack’s reflection, to give it a more realistic look to the scene. This is something that I was unable to do the first time. After completing the window shots, I had to concentrate on the shot filmed at the back of the train, where Johnny is standing watching the train speed down the track. Again this looked like a simple green-screen shot to replace with footage shot in Indiana. I put this shot off until nearly last, and we didn’t record the moving background until very late in September. When I began to composite the two shots together, I discovered that the lighting on the green-screen was bed, and created a lot of “shadow artifact”, I had to go in frame by frame to pain this out. Fortunately the shot only lasts three seconds, and I was able to finish this in record time. With those shots finished, my attention turned to enhancing the battle footage that was shot during the Snodgrass Hill filming dates. Many of the shots lacked punch, such as bullet hits, smoke or explosions. Especially the shot when Johnny is knocked down just before being attacked by the Confederate colonel. These were probably the easiest of all the CGI to complete, and a real explosion filmed in front of a blue-screen was used to enhance the shots. Many of the bullet hits and extra debris won’t even be noticed by most viewers, because they happen so fast. But if you were to compare the two versions of the shots together, you’d notice them. There were two shots that I thought needed a more ‘gory’ enhancement – the shot of the third flag bearer getting shot and the one of Johnny being shot in the ear. A little CGI blood splatter was added to the scenes. This is very apparent in the flag bearer as the splat is huge, but with Johnny’s shot it happens so fast and small that it’s hard to see, but it’s there and helps to draw the attention to his ear when he’s hit. Next up was the scene with the explosion in the field that was filmed that Saturday evening in September. This was one of the more difficult shots to complete, because the explosion needed to hit the ground behind Johnny and the officers standing in the field. I used a process the visual effect industry calls ‘rotoscoping’, which is a process of tracing over the live action footage frame by frame to separate the sections of the film that is needed (or in my case, not needed). It’s the same process used for years in Disney animation, and also to create the lightsaber effects in the ‘Star Wars’ films. Moving one frame at a time, I had to carefully trace around the outline of each officer in the field to separate him from the background, and then afterwards I could insert the explosion into the footage making it look like the blast was behind the men standing there. I spent nearly three months working on this scene. I’m pretty happy with it, but I still think a few months more work would have improved it. It did give me a quick and much needed lesson on rotoscoping, which I would use later in other shots with greater effect. The last remaining shots that were done for the film were actually the most complex, but really not the hardest. We had two scenes, one showing a shot of Camp Dennison and an other showing New York City during the Civil War. These would be matte paintings, created completely on the computer using a mixture of Lightwave 3D and After Effects. We had filmed five green-screen shots back in February right after the train scenes where I had various reenactors walk around or stand on the greenscreen and I filmed them. These would be used as the people moving around in the mattes, do give the paintings a sense of perspective and life. These worked well, but proved to be very troublesome as the lighting was too bright in spots and would obscure the green-screen at times. I spent nearly three months putting together the CGI matte paintings of the two locations, and to make my work easier I cheated in a few areas and used photographs taken in various parks and fields for the sections of grass and the trees that you see in the shots. But the buildings, tents, and statues you see had to be created from scratch. For the Camp Dennison shot, I used a field near Miamisburg, the town where I live, as the background and sky plates used. The field I chose had a huge power line running through the shot, so my first job was to paint it out to get rid of it. Second, I created the tents in Lightwave basing their look on tents from photographs I had taken nearly ten years ago at the Antietam 1997 reenactment. The two trees in the foreground were from photographs of a nearby park. As an added background touch, a flag blowing in the wind was added to the camp. The final stage was to composite the live action footage by rotoscoping each frame of the film and shrinking the shot to fit the perspective of the matte. The shot I’m most impressed with is the New York City scene. Again I used a photograph of a field to create the grass in the shot, and various photos of trees were also used as background. The tents were from a photograph taken at this year’s Granville event. Using a sketch created of Union Square in New York City from a wartime Harper’s Weekly, I created in Lightwave the buildings to match exactly as well as the statue. Two flags were added into the shot waving in the wind, one on top of the hotel building, and another on the statue. I placed the light source of the shot behind the flag to show the sun in the sky as if it was nearing late afternoon. Finally, the last step was to composite the live action footage the same way I did with the Camp Dennison shots, by rotoscoping every frame into the scene. I had a little difficulty with the bottom of one ladies’ dress, as she walks off of screen just slightly near the middle of the shot. The flowers along the sidewalk were added as a ‘cheat’ to cover up this small error. Another shot that I wanted to enhance was a shot of Johnny looking out of the window of the train car. Since all train scenes had to be shot inside the building, I wanted to give the shot a feel of movement, as if the train was moving down the track instead of just sitting still. This proved to be easier than I had originally anticipated. First the project was inputted into Adobe After Effects and layered into two separate sections, the window and the side of the car. By rotoscoping around the edge of the window, I inserted the reflection of sunset clouds moving past, to give the shot it’s sense of movement. I simply used a film shot of clouds obtained from a stock footage source and inserted it into the rotoscoped areas that were still exposed and turned down the opacity of the footage to about 25%. Next, a solid black layer was added at an opacity of 30% and animated to wash over the shot at a fast rate to create shadows of buildings as the train passes by. Then, I created a few bumps on the track to take out the smoothness of the shot and show the train bouncing down the track by just adjusting the position of the film for a frame in selected spots. After a total adjustment of the color levels of all layers, the shot was finished. One scene that was filmed and completed, but not used in the film, was the often spoke about shot of Johnny watching the city of Atlanta burn. I was never happy with this shot and I hope to be able to go back and redo this visual effect for the DVD release of the film. However, one version was created using the green-screen footage shot in December/ I used a photograph of a field landscape that I had taken in Virginia on Sailor’s Creek Battlefield as the backdrop, lowering down the lighting and replacing the sky with a starry horizon to create the illusion of nighttime. Then, pre-shot stock footage of flames burning were inserted between the layers to show the fire in the background, and an incandescent glow created to create the scale of the scene. While it’s not a bad effort in whole, the shot isn’t exactly how I had pictured it and I feel the flames are just too big at times, as if Johnny’s watching a huge forest wildfire rather than something that’s far off in the distance. One of the biggest shots to be abandoned for the film was the two shots of the train approaching the train station and moving past that were to be used in two separate times in the film. I had begun work back in February on creating an totally CGI 1860s period train to use in both the shots. I began the compositing work on both the scenes, and even began the layering process of inserting the train into the shots. But what needed to be understood is that the art of CGI is an incredibly difficult and time-consuming process that takes an enormous amount of talent and creative know-how, not to mention an intimate knowledge of the workings of the program you’re using, which in my case was Lightwave #D Professional. This same work which I was undertaking on my own is usually done using dozens of people, and unfortunately when we began to roll into September I realized that there would be no way I would be able to complete the shots satisfactory by the October due date for the film. It’s sad that I had to abandoned the shots, as they would have looked incredible in the film and even now, with the film finished, I still continue to work on them with the hopes of completing them in time for the DVD release. Another visual effect shot that I had worked on and really wanted to get into the film was the removal of the door hinge in the recruiting office scenes. On the shots where Johnny and his friend run up to the door of the building to look at the posters, you can see a very modern hinge at the top of the door. I had tried to carefully remove the hinge from the shot, which required for me to take every frame of the three angles, one by one, and send them over into Photoshop where I could paint out the hinge. Then, the frame would be inputted into After Effects and the scene reassembled there. I was having great success with the shots, but it was an incredibly time-consuming process and there were nearly 1000 frames that had to be individually painted and replaced. When I finished, which was sometime in September and only a few weeks before the footage was due, I noticed that there were problems with some of the shadowing in the shots around the areas where I had altered. The moving shadows tended to attract you eye line away from the actors in the shot, and since this was a visual effect that I didn’t want people to notice a problem of this nature can’t be tolerated. I’m hoping to have this problem corrected for us to be able to replace the shots in the near future.” The film was completed on October 25th, 2007 a mere two weeks before the premiere in Newark, Ohio. Clocking in at just a few minutes over an hour, it is the achievement of nearly two and a half years of hard work and dedication from the producers. Their dreams of bringing young Johnny Clem’s story to the big screen accomplished, the filmmakers look back at the finished end product they had put so much time and effort into: “The film turned out a lot better than I though was possible,” states director David Burns. “The shots that I had argued that we would be able to get, we got, and they turned out better than I had thought they would. The epic battle scenes we filmed at the reenactments matches seamlessly with the shots we filmed and set up on our own sets. Wayne and I were able to do what we originally set out to do and much, much more." “I am very pleased with the film.” Producer Wayne Whited looks back at their creation. “We managed to do everything that we had wanted to do, and more. We were beginners in the art of independent production when we first entered the project back in 2005, and I was worried that we wouldn’t be able to handle the pressures and time restraints that this type of filmmaking brings. But we handled every problem like experts who had been doing this for a very long time. We discovered that if we put our heads together, we can accomplish anything we want." Director David Burns, and his final thoughts for the production of “Johnny”: “I really hope this film educates the film on Johnny’s story and who he was. I hope it opens up their eyes to what our ancestors did for us. I hope that in some way this helps to preserve Johnny’s history, even if it is to just save anything that was Johnny’s. For the people in the city of Newark, Ohio and for anyone in our nation, I hope it brings back some of the pride missing in their city and their country for this hero that had grown up so many years ago. The history he had with the military is an incredible story, and I hope people can bring out of this film a little of the fascination that I had when I first heard of the story. I hope this opens up eyes across the country to see this boy who ran away from home to fight in a war to preserve what we take for granted today.”
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