By Adam Remson

Editor’s Note: This is the first installment of a periodic column in which artists discuss how they deploy the tools of their trade to achieve the desired effect. Toolbox will either correspond to the week’s "Top Spot" or focus on another noteworthy project.

Removing tattoos is a process that is both painstaking and painful. Indeed, the visual effects team at Smoke & Mirrors, London, experienced the time-crunch pain after two weeks of production and four weeks of post on the Sci Fi Channel’s "Tattoo Man"—an ad featured in this week’s "Top Spot."

In the :90, four tattoos spring from a man’s body—a spider, a snake with a dragon’s head, three butterflies and a winged gothic-like male angel—to join him for dinner. According to Smoke & Mirrors’ senior Flame artist Tony Lawrence, time was a major factor on this project. "Our initial estimate, once we looked at the boards, was twelve weeks," he said.

Rebekah Hay, the effects shop’s producer, added that certain timesaving tricks had to be employed to accommodate the truncated schedule. "Even before they started shooting, we had to agree on models [for the tattoos] and make sure they were ones that could be animated relatively easily," she explained. "Something complicated like a tiger would have been very difficult to do in the time allotted, but a spider was much easier."

For the shoot, temporary tattoos were placed on the actor’s body, but to make the snake, spider and butterflies come to life, a combination of postproduction tools were used—Alias|Wavefront’s Maya for the 3-D animation and modeling (pre-existing models were used to save time but modified to meet the specifications), 2d3’s Boujou for motion tracking and Discreet’s Flame and Effect for rotoscoping, coloring and 2-D effects. However, in the case of the angel, an actor wearing makeup and prosthetic wings was shot using a green screen, then placed onto the tattooed man’s back in post.

"The most time-consuming part was running the angel through all sorts of various processes, color-correcting him and keying him," said Lawrence. "It took a lot of work before everybody felt that it looked like a tattoo, and not like a guy in a prosthetic suit." Hay noted other challenges in the case of the angel: "He was live action so we had to hand-rotoscope him, create mattes for him—and anything in front of him—treat him, put him back in the scene and restore everything back in front of him," she said. "When we finally got the look right, the render time on just one frame took forty or fifty minutes."

During production, the Smoke & Mirrors team conferred with real tattoo artists to finalize the designs. "There was a bit of to-and-fro between the 3-D modelers and tattoo artists to come up with the look for the tattoos," explained Lawrence. "Then the 3-D guys would take a 3-D model, flatten it, make it look like a tattoo, wrap it around a 3-D arm and do rough 3-D renders until it was in a position that everybody liked." At that point, the designs were taken off the 3-D arm, unfurled in the computer and printed so tattoo artists could make outlines of the designs for temporary tattoos to be placed on the actor’s body. Make-up artists then filled in the color directly on the actor’s skin.

According to the Smoke & Mirrors team, the most demanding effect was getting the snake to assume its three-dimensional shape while wrapped around the actor’s arm. To achieve the desired result, Smoke & Mirrors acquired a plug-in called Surface Deformer for scaling and deforming 3-D models, and used it in ways they hadn’t tried before. "Using the Surface Deformer plug-in took a bit of R&D to get the look just right," explained Hay. "To make the shot with the snake work, we had to model the actor’s arm in 3-D just for placement purposes, wind what was essentially a flat ribbon around the arm, place the 3-D model of the dragon on the ribbon and use Surface Deformer to inflate it. That took a little bit of working out."

Lawrence offered a simple analogy: "It’s a bit like if someone drew a car on a flat piece of paper, and the car inflates itself into three dimensions and drives off. But the tricky bit we had to do was lift the model off a curved surface. It took quite a lot to make it work really nicely."

In order to get the 3-D models to interact with the live action convincingly, tracking markers were used during the shoot that would be picked up by the Boujou motion-tracking software in post. "We used tracking markers for tracking the [tattooed man’s] arm movements," explained Hay. "The other thing we used [the tracking markers] for was the actor’s back. There was a series of tracking markers there to analyze the flex and twisting of the skin so as his back flexes, the angel flexes as well."

"Using tracking markers presents a tricky balancing problem because on one hand, the more tracking markers the better, but the more difficult it is to remove them later," added Lawrence. "You need a balance with enough for Boujou to pick up, but not too much so some poor rotoscoper has to remove them all and paint the skin back on."

Finally, getting the right "look and feel" gave the visual effects artists a very thin line to walk. "Vaughan [Arnell, director of ‘Tattoo Man’] had a very clear vision about retaining a graphic look for the tattoos when they came off the body," said head of 3-D Rebekah King-Britton. "We were finding a balance between them not looking like tattoos, but still retaining the feel of a tattooed graphic. It was a creative challenge to get that balance just right."

"Most of the tattoos were three, maybe four colors," related Lawrence. "In the Flame, we separated out all of the colors and the outline, and basically treated every element of the 3-D tattoo separately. As it lifts, it becomes slightly more colorful, and then we animated the shadows. If you look at a real tattoo—especially one that has been there for a while, they do go quite dull. And I think the idea is that the tattoos on his body should be dullish like the real tattoo, yet when they come to life, they become more noticeable and more magical."

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