(The simply beautiful Puffin Designs packaging of Commotion Pro)
After fifteen years of working in Motion Graphics there are precious few examples of software I actually feel emotional about. I like the Adobe applications Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects but they appeal to that part of me with obsessive compulsive disorder – especially After Effects with its regimented array of tiny little boxes to tick. Also the 3D app Maya I am fond of, the way the application sits so close to the coding level gives it a feeling of open-ness – other 3D apps I have used Bryce 3D, InfiniD, Lightwave, and Cinema 4D are hateful.
People probably don’t entertain the idea of being delighted with a piece of software- you wouldn’t expect anyone to get excited by Word or Excel (though I know there are Excel fans out there) and I have always believed Apple has missed a trick by making iTunes so clunky and counter-intuitive – if there’s an application that deserves to be rebuilt form the ground up it’s iTunes. But if the software we all used was actually built better, designed more intuitively with personality (rather than always on legacy by committee) then people might surprise themselves by falling in love with it.
The one piece of software I have always felt an almost unnatural affection for is called Commotion. Commotion is essentially a fully-fledged Compositing application. That’s to say Motion Effects designers at
ILM would have used it in its 1.0 incarnation (it existed before COSA After Effects 1.0) to combine various elements of moving footage together to create a “composited” result. Compositing is the essential staple of the moving image business but an often invisible art-form. However Commotion became to be known as complementary to dedicated Compositors (like After Effects) and a supplement to Editors like Final Cut Pro (a DV edition of it was offered free with the first incarnation of FCP). People perceived its strengths as lying in Rotoscoping, Motion-tracking and Wire-rig removal – even though it was far more capable than that.
Commotion was originally put together by industry legend
Scott Squires, a visual effects super at Industrial Light & Magic. Scott has
worked on some of the biggest and most successful effects movies that Hollywood ever produced, often in the capacity of Visual Effects Supervisor – I suppose highlights of this career would include Academy Award Nominations for The Mask (1994), Dragonheart (1996) and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999). Scott founded the company Puffin Designs to market the app. Puffin was quite swiftly bought by video behemoth Pinnacle (always in my mind memorable as creators of the Targa format and its associated video cards). Pinnacle was in turn swallowed by Avid who quite recently wound down development on Commotion by
2006, however by this stage it had become quite bloated and ugly. Truthfully, Commotion 2.2 (1999), before the sale to Pinnacle, was where it was at.
I won’t go into great length about my user experience with Commotion. It’s quite difficult to convey this kind of thing but suffice to say everything about it was elegant, intuitive, quick, efficient, rock-solid and inventively implemented to the degree that I still find it a useful tool. My favourite experience with Commotion came in 2005.
Zombie Flesheaters, Jamie Hewlett’s company who are responsible for the visual accompaniment to the Gorillaz virtual band, brought me in at the eleventh hour. They had tried to achieve an effect for the Manana film for the Demon Dayz concerts in Manchester of a drawing scribbling itself on. They’d originally tried to achieve this by filming Jamie in stop-motion as he did the drawing in question – however the Director of Photography had a been a complete klutz and it was poorly-lit and the picture not tight enough in frame. It had taken them three weeks and three Flame operators (these guys get thousands of pounds a day) at Soho post house
Golden Square to try and clean it up, but it still looked like shit.
I parachuted in and suggested we use Commotion’s ability to record and then animate on a stroke to achieve the shot. We simply scanned the end picture in at high resolution, I recorded a sequence of passes of myself rubbing out Jamie’s drawing and to their absolute delight Commotion chugged away quietly and delivered the job in one night – ready for the live premiere ten hours later. Out of the box no other app would have been able to achieve this, not After Effects, not Shake, not Flash.
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Just this last fortnight I was asked by a very eminent Design Agency to do a similar thing. Some exquisite typographic designs needed to be written-on in the manner of handwriting. This might have been achievable with vector masking in After Effects but really the implementation would have been inappropriate and unbearably fiddly. So I dug my old license of Commotion out of the basement. I found an old G4 400 Mac tower on eBay which I picked up in the van from Tottenham Court Road (the software must run under Mac OS 9, not Mac OS X) and payed the princely sum of £40 for it. It was a salutary experience recalling that I paid £2500 for my original Mac of this era (a loaded G4 500). With a bit of elbow grease I got the correct Operating system installed, found the old dongle drivers (Commotion used an USB hardware lock) and got the old war horse working again over a decade after I first used it.
In the intervening years we have had hardcore roto apps like Curious gFx come and go (
bought by Adobe), we’ve seen Shake been
killed by Apple (Shake has marvelous masks which you specify the width of the feather) and while some contenders like
Silhouette remain current, the mainstream alternatives offered in After Effects and now Photoshop Extended have failed to deliver what the charming and elegant Commotion offered in spades.
