Around the world on the back of some of the most successful films of all time, Paul Kirwan has landed back at ANU where it all started.

April 1912. The unsinkable Titanic, the ship of dreams, sets sail into the north Atlantic for its maiden voyage. With no inkling of the tragedy that awaits them, passengers take to the decks as the smoke stacks steam into the air, birds dive and circle as if joining the celebration, and Leonardo DiCaprio climbs to the bow to proclaim he’s the king of the world.

It’s a familiar scene for Paul Kirwan from the School of Art at ANU, as he spent months as a compositor crafting the images to which millions of cinema goers flocked in 1997. A compositor’s role is to integrate the different elements of visual effects shots – both filmed and computer-generated - so that the viewer believes that what they are seeing is real. Kirwan uses the example of a sound engineer who assembles the guitar, percussion, keyboard and vocal tracks of a pop song, to create the illusion that the band were all playing in the same room at the same time; a compositor does the same thing, but with images instead of sound.
Kirwan’s work on the visual effects in Titanic included that iconic scene of the ship first being taken to sea. “We took the film of the 45-foot model of the ship, the digital ocean and the computer generated (CG) passengers and layered them with the CG smoke from the smokestacks and birds flying by,” he says. “You know that the ship wasn’t actually real but I don’t think people realized the full extent of the work that went into it. And that’s the work that I’m most proud of – when you don’t even know I was there.”

The deck of the Titanic, even the small-scale model, was a long way from Canberra in the late 1980s. Kirwan grew up in the nation’s capital and studied at ANU with little idea of what the future would hold for him. A self-confessed nerd, he completed a Bachelor of Science with majors in Computer Science and Mathematics in 1990. After a short stint in the public service, he returned to a Master of Arts (Electronic Arts) at ANU.

“I’d always been a bit of a computer graphics aficionado,” Kirwan says. “I just used to dabble but I went through a major phase in fractals and chaos theory. I found it fascinating that you could use this branch of mathematics to illustrate forms of nature that previously had been very difficult to describe. Patterns of turbulence, clouds, the way smoke moves and the way water flows.”

In 1996, still working through the Masters degree, he received a job offer that was too good to be true. Digital Domain, director James Cameron’s visual effects company in Los Angeles, had just finished working on Apollo 13 and offered Kirwan a 12-month contract. Upcoming projects included Titanic, The Fifth Element and Dante’s Peak.

Kirwan put his studies on hold for a year so he could work with the team that he says were gods in his eyes. “I was just in the right place at the right time and I had learnt the software at university. It was a fringe, procedural, physical animation package that not many people knew. A version of it is still used by the ANU supercomputing facility.”

After an intense year working on three major feature films, Kirwan returned to Australia in 1997. He finished his Masters and worked in Australia on George Miller’s Babe: Pig in the City as well as commercials and TV projects.

“In this industry, about 80 per cent of the work is either commercial or broadcast design; about 15 per cent is actual television shows and only five per cent is film,” says Kirwan. “I kind of went straight to the top end in a sense, and when I came back I was almost over-qualified. It was funny to go from the Hollywood cutting edge to dog-food commercials and flying logos. It’s the majority of the industry work available, but it wasn’t really what I wanted to do.”

But from talking animals, Kirwan’s career took him to work on two of the most successful films of all time. Two years in Wellington with effects facility Weta saw his talents go to work on The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers.

“I worked on some great shots, including the beginning of the battle of Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers. The characters are looking out from the walls of the keep, and all you can see of the approaching army is a sea of torches. Then there are a couple of bolts of lightning and it starts to rain, and there’s the idea that the storm is breaking just as this huge conflict is beginning. That’s still some of the work I’m most proud of. I also did some work with Gollum, the first true central character to a film who was completely virtual.”

Kirwan was leading teams of compositors by that time and after two years in Wellington and a joint share in another two Academy Awards (his first was for Titanic), returned to the US where he worked on the first Pirates of the Caribbean, Master and Commander, Zoom, Stealth and Transformers before he finally returned to his home town and ANU in 2007.

“I’d been trying to come back to the University for some time but we’d always been like ships in the night. There had been times when ANU had contacted me about an opening, but I was right in the middle of a project. And there were times when I had approached them, but there were no opportunities available.”

Now back where it all started, Kirwan says he is indulging himself with a PhD which will see him build some procedural software tools and use those to explore generative art – a process of creating images where the mechanics of the creation are at least as interesting as the results themselves. He’s also teaching courses in Digital Video and is preparing for the University’s new Masters program in Visual Effects, which has its first intake of students this year. The course will combine components of the existing Digital Video course with animation and compositing. It will be quite specialized but has had positive interest right from the start.

“In Australia at the moment there are short courses you can do in software techniques, or in short film or animation. But currently there’s nothing at this level in this more specialized area,” Kirwan says.

“Being back at ANU is fantastic, because it gives me the opportunity to move into a more academic and artistic role, without feeling that I’m losing the benefit of all those years of hard work in industry. And I’m looking forward to passing on some of that experience to our students.”

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ANU Reporter 
Summer 2008