Leading up to the Visual Storytelling Conference, we’re putting the spotlight on some of the instructors! Meet them and find out what you can learn from them at the conference, plus some pre-conference insights.
Don’t have your free ticket yet? Register today and join us for free, March 10-13, 2022!
Jim Tierney
Jim Tierney founded Digital Anarchy in 2001 and has been a pioneer in the development of visual tools for motion graphics and compositing. During the 1990s, Jim worked for software companies like MetaTools, Atomic Power and Cycore. He helped create graphics products like Bryce, Evolution and Final Effects.
After working on After Effects plugins for over five years, Jim thought it was finally time to get out there and develop some of his own — so Digital Anarchy was born! Since then he has been dedicated to finding ways of bringing innovative technology to video editors, broadcast designers, visual fx artists, and everyone that wants to make film/TV look better and do it more easily.
Can you tell us a little about what you’ll be teaching for the Visual Storytelling Conference?
“I’ll be showing how to use Beauty Box Video which is one of the included pieces of software for VIP attendees. It’s the industry leading plugin solution for doing beauty work and digital makeup and each VIP attendee gets a perpetual license of the latest version, 5.0. I’ll go over how to use the plugin in Premiere and FCP going from quick and easy ways to touch up your talent with just a few clicks to more advanced retouching using Masks.”
How did you get started in photography and videography?
“I started doing photography in high school and eventually moved to graphic design. That got me hired with a company (MetaTools) that made the first Photoshop plugins. They also made the first After Effects plugin package and that was my introduction to video. I eventually started Digital Anarchy in 2001 to develop my own products for video production.”
What makes you push the envelope in terms of your creativity?
“Most people, I think, don’t think of software development as creative, but it definitely is. It’s always a challenge looking at the problems video production folks have and coming up with a solution that 1) works and 2) is easy to use. I’m always reading about technology and constantly looking at new tech to see if it’s something we can integrate to make our products better (or come up with new products). Beauty Box is a good example. When we first released it, there wasn’t much in the way of retouching tools for video and the few that did exist were cumbersome to use because of needing to figure out what the skin tones were. We used facial recognition to identify skin tones, simplifying the part, and fed that into a keying algorithm to create an automatic mask that only retouched the skin areas.”
What’s one piece of advice you can give related to your courses?
“Come with footage of your talent that you want to work on. Especially someone that needs a bit of retouching. While Beauty Box does get used for feature films and television, it’s used a lot for corporate work as well. There are a lot of executive types that don’t think they need makeup on set … until they see themselves on an 80” television in 4K. And somehow it’s the videographers fault they don’t look as ‘youthful’ as they think they are. We help videographers avoid that conversation. ;-)”
What’s one challenge you’ve had in your career, and how have you overcome it?
“Digital Anarchy almost failed in 2013, to the point I was sending out resumes. (we had decided to focus on Photoshop plugins instead of Video plugins) Both my co-founder and I decided job hunting sucked and bounced around some ideas to see if we could crank out a few products in a short amount of time. We pivoted back to video plugins, released a couple new products in a short period and the company rebounded. We’re now doing better than ever. I think the lesson there is don’t get too attached to your decisions. Obviously you need to persevere to a point, but if something really isn’t working, it’s OK to abandon it and try something else … Especially if that something else is something you had success with previously.”
