Congratulations to CDE Research Engineer Steve Willey for successfully defending his thesis ‘Improving the Pipeline for Stereo Post-Production’. Steve joined CDE in 2009 and completed his industrial placement at one of the world’s largest providers of visual effects for Film, Double Negative. Congratulations also go to his supervising team, originally Prof Phil Willis (University of Bath), Prof Jian Jun Zhang (Bournemouth University), Jeff Clifford (Double Negative and more recently, Prof Peter Hall (University of Bath) and Ted Waine (Double Negative).

Steve highlighted that “completing the EngD has been a huge challenge, but definitely a worthwhile one. Thanks to the CDE I have had the opportunity to research while gaining valuable experience in the industry of VFX for film and TV as well as the chance to attend conferences around the world. I have also had the chance to meet a lot of great people in academia and industry thanks to the crossover provided by the EngD”.

A bit about the research.

Many considerations must go into making a 3D film that isn’t a problem with standard 2D ones. We investigate the problems of colour mismatch, vertical alignment, and disparity map generation while providing an in-depth study into the further requirements of a 3D film. In addition, we introduce several tools that integrate into the existing post-production pipeline to improve its capabilities when dealing with stereo images.

Dr Steve Willey is now working full-time for Double Negative. We wish him every success in his future career.