Continuum Complete User Story

Shane Barrell - Shane Barrell Films

After many years on the cutting edge of motion graphics and animation design in the UK, for projects airing on global venues including the BBC and ITV, Shane Barrell has had to take advantage of every tool at his disposal to stay on top. The tools he comes back to again and again are found in Boris Continuum Complete.

“In my work I have to constantly push for new and fresh looks, utilizing old and new techniques. Boris Continuum Complete filters certainly give me the edge and have helped me out of many tight spots, especially when deadlines are pressing down hard.”

Because of the heavy demands of his schedule, Shane especially appreciates the many timesaving features in Boris Continuum Complete. “One of my favorite aids is BCC Colour Palette,” says Shane. “It’s a simple filter, but offers great power when used correctly, and has saved tremendous amounts of time for me.”

For example, when designing the title sequence and logo for the ITV Award Winning “The Sketch Show” for Baby Cow Productions/Triffic Films, Shane had a good idea of how the logo needed to look. But he also knew that the producers were going to want to look at a number of different color schemes. He set up his design, and linked the colors from the BCC Color Palette filter throughout his composition with Adobe After Effects’ expressions.

“I quickly created many alternatives of the design with a simple few clicks in one easy accessible location on BCC Color Palette without the need to go into many, many layers and tweaking each color separately. This in itself probably saved me days of work, and allowed myself to concentrate on the design and not the technical aspects of multi-layer color correction. This filter was a real lifesaver.”

The following season, Shane did indeed need to make sweeping changes to the color scheme, and also needed to update older footage. “BCC Linear Colour Key helped me to pull certain colors out from the video, allowing me to get just the red that I wanted from the original video source, without the need to think about how I would get just one color separated from the rest. This is a great filter with lots of nice options to get really tough colors out from a difficult source.

“I’ve also managed to save a lot of time with BCC Tritone filter, which can very quickly apply broader changes across an entire composition. This one is truly essential for helping to make colors match that would otherwise be all over the place. BCC Colorize is an even more powerful version of this. Instead of working with a separate color for black, white and midpoint like Tritone, it uses a gradient for the entire color range. This is another one that I’m using all the time.”

Another major timesaving filter for Shane is the BCC Gaussian Blur. “It’s absolutely invaluable, with options for seperate directional blur and rendering speed improvements over the standard After Effects blur. This has become my standard blur filter now, saving me so much time in the final render allowing me to work up closer to deadlines than ever before.”

“For example, for the BBC's Award Winning black comedy 'Human Remains' ( Baby Cow Productions/ Triffic Films), the title sequence required many layers of really blurred video and text to form an abstract image montage so as not to give too much about the show away. The render speed improvements absolutely saved me here in a tight deadline, and made it possible for me to really experiment creatively with the layers without the worry of sacrificing creativity because I’d run out of time to do something better.

Continuing the theme of time, Boris CONTINUUM COMPLETE’s time filters are among the most distinctive aspects of the package. With 110 filters in all, ten of them are devoted to the manipulation of time. “One of the techniques I use most frequently is to give video an animated look,” says Shane. “I use it in almost everything I do.

“One of my favorite filters for this is BCC Posterize Time. The normal After Effects posterize time effect is just too basic for my needs. And coming from a traditional animation background, BCC’s method of organizing the animation simply makes more sense to me. The Time Mix mode of Dissolve allows me to get some really great looking animated looks from standard video, such as the look that each frame has been treated separately as some kind of printout or drawing.”

To further enhance the impression of cutout animation, Shane relies on BCC Edge Lighting, “definitely one of my most favorite tricks,” he says with a laugh. “I use it when I need that cut-out animated look or need to get something to fit into a scene properly with great lighting that reflects the background.

“For Dr Terrible's House of Horrible( Baby Cow/ Triffic Films), we needed to create a real feeling of the old 'Tales of the Unexpected' meets 'Hammer horror'. The sequence, following a bat flying through a creepy forest full of horror needed an extra punch to pull it all together. BCC Edge Lighting added that 'pull' with red fire-y highlights to fit all the cutout work into the background.

“Another example was for the BBC New Comedy Awards, where BCC Edge lighting helped to create a slight edge to give the cutout animation a 'real' look. The final result looked like a collection of lots of photos all moving around in a collage, with each piece looking like it was on a separate bit of card.

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“The new BCC Wood Grain filter also helped to create the organic looking wooden door on one of the final images which saved having to go hunting for a nice texture, and the new BCC Light Zoom helped to create some really nice beams of light coming from behind the doors, without overwhelming the scene. The additional controls offered by the BCC Light Zoom compared to other, similar filters is one of the things I very much like about it.

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BCC Edge Lighting also helped to create a nice 'part' highlight on the character to reflect the intense light coming from withing the scene.

Along with CONTINUUM COMPLETE’s lighting filters, Shane finds it helpful to bring in several of the displacement filters, which he used together for Golden Rose Comedy Award Winner “Lenny Henry: In Pieces” (Tiger Aspect/Triffic Films). “The standard set of displacement tools just didn’t allow for the control that I needed and moved the image in ways that didn’t satisfy my needs. The BCC Displacement Map, along with BCC Spotlight, helped make a much convincing ‘shatter’ at the end of the animation.”

An upcoming comedy show for for BBC 3 (formerly BBC Choice ) is called “Brain Candy” ( Baby Cow/ Baby Cow Animation/Skint Records), and offered Shane an opportunity to put many of these elements together at once. “Using only a rough cut of Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice,” I had to produce something very funky suitable for the atmosphere of the show.

“Many images of different people had to be mixed in to each other without showing the comedians identity. I started with BCC Tritone to bring the colors up from black and white to a universal ‘gold’ look, and mixed in the BCC Film Damage filter for a scratchy look.

“BCC Cartooner also helped a great deal here to create line artwork easily and quickly as an extra layer to add to the video mush. I finished it off with BCC Jitter, which gave me a great ‘jiggering’ to the footage. This was a filter that offered exceptional control, while also being easy to learn.”

As much ground as these projects cover, they reflect only a small sample of the 110 filters found in CONTINUUM COMPLETE. Make no mistake: Shane finds ways to use them all. “I’m always stumbling upon new ways to mix filters and how to use them,” Shane says, adding with a smile, “They’re a great set of toys that you can use as tools.”