Continuum Complete User Story

Kurt Wiley -Stevenson Ranch

We normally begin our user profiles with a picture of our subject's faces, but the best we could do with Kurt Wiley is this picture of the back of his head. For a glimpse of his face, you might check the DVD for the Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi thriller The Sixth Day, where Kurt appears in a couple of the included behind-the-scenes documentaries, elaborating on effects he contributed to at Visual Concept Entertainment owned by award winning Peter Kuran.

"CONTINUUM COMPLETE was invaluable here. We had around 200 shots of a 'foosh' beam that was based on changes we made to shots of flame from an acetylene torch. The gas made yellow flames, but the director decided he wanted them blue. We not only needed some very complicated color correction as a result, we needed to create the impression of reflected light on people in the scene. We used CONTINUUM's color and lighting filters for both of those tasks.

"We went even further with one of the movie's most complex sequences, which involved the creation of virtual girl. She was shot in front of a greenscreen, then motion tracked to her very reactive actors staged on a separate background set. The problem is that key lighting is by design very flat, but scene lighting in film is very dimensional. So after we pulled the key, we used CONTINUUM to add dimension back to the girl, which was a big part of making her look 'right.'

"There were many other filters that we used, including lots of particles. CONTINUUM's particles are also a big part of a lot of DVD animation design I contribute to, but you'll see a lot of them in The Sixth Day."

You can see some specific examples Kurt's work on "The Sixth Day" at the website for VisualConcept Entertainment, http://www.vce.com/the6thday.html

The list of movies and television shows that Kurt has used Boris products on is a long one, including the the 2002 release "Four Feathers," "Deliver Us from EVA", Mattel's "Hot Wheels" ads, "Thirteen Days", "Xena", "Young Hercules", "Idle Hands," "Lake Placid", and VCEs' line of award winning atomic documentaries.

"One of the more famous, or maybe infamous, effects I've ever created was one in 'Lake Placid' where a diver gets bit in half by an alligator as he's hauled back into a boat. His bottom was in a blue wetsuit, the filmmakers' thought being that it would be easy to key that out, and composite in bits of his dangling torso.

"Unfortunately, there were blue reflections in the lake surface, on the side of the boat, and in the water that he brought into the boat when he's dragged into it. Some of those blue reflections were trying to key out, when we needed them corrected, and left alone.

"We ended up rotoing out the wetsuit, reconstructing the boat, rotoing in new water and relighting and edge lighting the new stuff with Boris Correct Selected Color and Edge Light filters. Combined with its PixelChooser, we could create animateable mattes within the filters, speeding up rendering and putting the changes where we needed them."

Color filters and PixelChooser came into play on another feature whose name Kurt can't mention. "Sorry, that's just the way it is on some features," he says with a smile. "It was a feature that had originally been shot for an R rating, but the producers decided after it was in the can that they'd rather do a PG-13 release. So I went back in using the PixelChooser built into CONTINUUM's color filters to clean up blood.

"It would have taken too long and been too complicated to paint out, and since the sets had been struck long ago, we didn't always have clean plates to work from. So we re-colored the blood the same color as the things it was covering, and blended a lot of it away that way.

"Of course, on another major feature I did, they wanted to EMPHASIZE the blood," Kurt laughs, "so I used CONTINUUM's Edge Lighting and 3D Particle Systems filters to make it really stand out."

One of the most frequent uses Kurt makes of CONTINUUM is blending 3D models into 2D compositions. "The problem is that the 3D files with alphas often have hard, wrong colored edges. Compositing these into 2D shots gives them away all too often unless these are fixed. Once again, CONTINUUM light, and alpha filters to the rescue!

"Once the models are integrated at the edges, we frequently need to adjust timing, which is a snap with CONTINUUM's wide range of time filters. We change durations, pacing, add motion blur - all kinds of things. It's a remarkably powerful tool that way."

Among the reasons they use 3D models with live footage is to blow the models up. Kurt has used CONTINUUM to simulate mid-air collisions with explosions such as those featured in Visual Concept Entertainments' NUCLEAR 911 documentary DVD, as well as clouds of dust when debris from plane crashes slammed into the desert.

While most people think of Boris products being applied to "real" video and film footage, or for integrating graphics into video and film, Kurt has made wide use of Boris products to enhance more traditional, cel-based animation.

"'Secret of the Sapphires' is a project I've been working with off and on for years. It started as a sort-of sequel to an old fairy tale, but it's taken on a life of its own as a more contemporary, anime-oriented project.

"There are an amazing number of things I do with CONTINUUM in this context. I use Sequencer, one of the time filters, to add subtle animation within animation. Optical Flow helps facial tweening. Rain, Snow, Particle Systems and Natural Media filters enhance realism. And one of the things I do most often is use lighting filters to add mood and dimension - LOTS of light filters, especially Spot Light and Edge Lighting, along with their Pixel Choosers to control where the light should go."

In all of this, Kurt remains impressed with much more than the filters themselves. "It's clear that the entire Boris line has been developed with real-world production in mind. As often as I use these filters, I keep coming up with even more ways to use them, and have even created specific jobs based on effects I know I can create with CONTINUUM."