puffin designs commotion, a look back

Matthew Ingram reflects on Puffin Designs Commotion Pro, a great read. I remember using Commotion and its rotosplines, so very sweet for the time for sure. In fact it took me a while to get used to After Effect’s masking…just not the same back then.

Commotion was originally put together by industry legend Scott Squires, a visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic… Mr. Squires posts:

“Commotion was a software packages I wrote for myself while at ILM. It started as ‘Flipbook’ and allowed realtime playback of images on a Mac II. (This would later be used as a design basis for other tools at ILM.) It also had a flowchart compositing system. You could actually setup multiple composites all types of other things. (yes, before After Effects, Shake, Nuke, etc)

ILM had an SGI tool that did image processing but the command line interface made it less than useful for the artist. I created a Mac app that provided and interface and send the commands onto to the SGI. I had also written an app that would control Photoshop so it could be used on multiple frames. I was an VFX supervisor at ILM, not a software developer, so all this was to provide me tools so I could do my work without fighting the system and getting proper software written.

The originally released product was a bit different (roto, paint and playback) and certainly when the compositing was released it was aimed more at AE style than the original.”