Emile Tobenfeld a.k.a Doctor T

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I have thought of myself as an artist (photographer, electronic musician, videographer, VJ, etc.) since I left graduate school (Ph. D, in Physics) in 1970. I have (like most artists) supported myself with day jobs.. Since 1984, these jobs have involved making tools for artists to use - first as the founder and chief engineer of Doctor T's Music Software, a pioneering MIDI software company, and, more recently, with Boris FX. I've been a software engineer and visual effects designer with Boris since 1997.

I purchased Final Effects (directly from Sweden) when it first came out in 1995. I've been using BCC (and its predecessors) since we started developing them during my first year with Boris. It has been a pleasure to work with both products as both artist and developer, and a special pleasure to add some new twists to old favorites such as FEC Kaledia and FEC Radial Scale Wipe.

I used both BCC and FEC in a recent video titled "Winter's Meditation", which was inspired by the large amount of snow we had this past winter. Almost all of the still images used in this piece were taken this past winter, some in the Boris FX parking lot.

I structured the piece as a sequence of visual drones, similar to drones in music. I took each of the still images and made a number of heavily treated variations --- some in Photoshop and some in After Effects using BCC and FEC filters. I created compositions in After Effects in which variants of an image faded into each other while maintaining the same motion. Each AE comp had two or three sequences using the same image, with these sequences fading into each other.

BCC Pan and Zoom is fastest and most flexible tool I've seen for creating this kind of effect, but it required some set up work to keep the motion of the different variants in sync. Fortunately, I only had to do this work once. I broke each comp up into precomps, and, for the first precomp, created a solid, imported one of the stills, applied Pan and Zoom and created the motion I wanted. I then created a second solid and applied Pan and Zoom to it, and used AE expressions to link all of the controls that I might need to change (including the animation and preview options) to the corresponding controls in the first solid.

I chose an image for the second Pan and Zoom, added a couple of opacity keyframes, and had an animation with the same motion for both. Then I duplicated this layer as many times as needed. For each layer I set new images and adjusted opacity keyframes. I could then duplicate the precomp as many times as needed, replace the images, and change the motion for all by just editing the bottom solid's Pan and Zoom.

I jazzed up some of the comps by using effects such as BCC Ripple, FEC Tiler, or my old favorite FEC Kaleida to an adjustment layer above all of the precomps in the final comp. One of the cool things I did to many of the FEC filters was to allow the Pixel Chooser to undistort the image. This provides a much more organic blend of distorted and original images than a simple opacity blend. I further jazzed up FEC Kaleida by allowing the Pixel Chooser to control the distortion between two different kaleidoscopes, or to use it as a displacement map within the effect.

I brought all of the rendered comps into FCP, and sequenced them, using simple dissolves to fade from one to the next. (I'd have used FEC Blur Dissolve, but I hadn't written it yet!). I added a few BCC and FEC FxPlug effects in the FCP timeline, dragging favorites (including animation) into a project bin so I could reuse them in other parts of the timeline.

I added some additional rendered comps to a second video track, and often used FEC Radial Scale Wipe to composite them over the first track. Radial Scale Wipe is one of my favorite filters – I find that it makes nice organic picture in picture effects, and tend to use it more for PIPs than for transitions.

About the Sample Project

The sample project contains a composition typical of those used in the piece. The main comp contains 3 precomps, each of which contains 3 linked BCC Pan And Zoom instances, producing a render that fades among versions of the source image while keeping the same motion for all versions. Note that the solids the filter is applied to need to be exactly the same length for this to work.

The first screen shot shows one of the precomps. The Pan and Zoom Slave layers have all of the controls that I expect to vary kinked to the Pan and Zoom Master. All adjustments to the animation are made in the master and get picked up by the slaves. If an additional still image is needed, I just have to duplicate one of the slaves.

The main comp has two adjustment layers. The first of these contains an FEC Kaleida effect which makes use of the Pixel Chooser to animate from no effect to a full effect and back to no effect. It uses the Pixel Chooser's distance to point region, and animates the From and To sliders to achieve the desired effect. The result looks organic because the Pixel Chooser controls the amount of distortion instead of producing a simple matte.

The second adjustment layer uses a BCC Pyramid Blur with vertical blur .75 to reduce interlace flicker.

The second screen shot shows the main comp.

The third screen shot shows some of the rendered sequences layered in FCP using FEC Radial Scale Wipe to create an organic looking picture in picture effect. I've been using the filter in this way for years, and I still don't get tired of its look.

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