Need fire? Lightning? An ocean? Blair Burtan ('88,'90) can help.

While he won't deliver the real thing to your doorstep, his company, Northern Lights Productions, will supply the software to create such special effects for your upcoming movie or television show. Among those who have taken him up on the offer are Industrial Light and Magic, which is George Lucas's special effects unit, Disney, DreamQuest Images, and Paramount Pictures.

That's a long way from his first job out of the College of Engineering, developing a satellite communications system that ran off the original Mac portable. But Burtan's been fascinated with films and special effects ever since Star Wars first appeared. "I walked out of that theater a changed person," he says. His interest grew when he worked for Mattel, where he got to work on 3-D animations and models for toys in development and on films shown at toy fairs to promote new toy product lines.

So when the ElectricImage Animation System, which is used by special effects developers, first came out about five years ago with a plug-in architecture, Burtan saw an opportunity to make special effects himself. "Nobody had ever done anything with it before, so I thought: time to dust off some programming skills," he says. While still working at Mattel, he wrote special effects software. It sold well and he wrote more. His customer base grew and "finally it got to the point that I could live off it and make it a viable enterprise," he says. "It was a matter of being in the right place at the right time. It was a brand new market that was hungry for product."

Now he has people working for him and goes to trade shows promoting his software, having learned along the way that "a great deal of business is just common sense."

Typical of his work is a recent project turning the software that made the water effects in Titanic into a commercial product that can be sold at a fraction of the original cost. "A lot of time when something is done specifically for a movie, it's written for one shot. Turning it into a commercial product so that anyone can use it is a very big challenge," Burtan says. The new product "allows you to generate ocean surfaces; point and click, and you've got instant ocean surface. Which may not necessarily seem like a big deal, but if you've got to do it, it's a huge deal.

"Sometimes what seems like the simplest of effects turns out to be very complex," adds Burtan, "especially natural stuff: oceans, terrain, smoke, clouds, fire -- they are all very difficult to do."

That ultimate programmer, Mother Nature, would probably agree.