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| Seeing the End in the Beginning. |
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Visual effects are an essential part of the recently completed The Tattooist starring Jason Bier (Roswell, The Grudge), the thriller/horror New Zealand Singaporean co-production. Albedo’s VFX Producer Maile Daugherty shares with eyeon the company’s experience of working with the film from its development through to final delivery. Gone are the days when visual effects artists, supervisors and producers say they work in “post production”. As The Tattooist proved to us once more, the VFX contribution to a film can start as early as when the project is still in development.
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| Can you create a tattoo that grows on someone’s skin? |
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Back in 2005 producer Robin Scholes (Once Were Warriors) approached Peter McCully, VFX Supervisor and owner of Auckland VFX company Albedo, with a question: Can you create a tattoo that grows on someone’s skin and can you make it seem that the tattoo is spreading from the inside, out? The answer was not untypical, we’re sure we can, we just need to figure out how! What Peter helped to develop became an integral part of the pitch pack, assisting the film’s producers in their quest to acquire production and financing partners.
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Being involved at the development stage is useful for a number of reasons. For a horror concept film, such as Tattooist, is helps external parties visualize the film and can provide a point of unity amongst the partners about the type of film they are all working towards. In relatively advanced script development, involving your VFX creatives can offer useful feedback about what is possible within the likely budget, which may curb some dramatic notions, but may also open up other avenues the writer never thought to think because they didn’t images that idea was possible to physically achieve. And once the director is on board working closely with them to develop the look and strategy to realize their vision for the film helps to move everything along.
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| Accommodating the Director. |
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In the case of The Tattooist, debut director Peter Burger had a clear idea of what he wanted. The visual effects fell into three camps, the growing tattoos with their splitting skin and blood and ink pouring out making a right mess, the manipulation of ink in water in a variety of situations, and the more stock standard clean-ups, day-for-night transformations, green screen etc work. Albedo created two teams of artists to work with each tattoos and ink in water, and set about the R&D.
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| Albedo's Approach to the Ink and Blood. |
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Ink and blood in water was a big part of the script and wherever possible Albedo’s approach was to use filmed elements. We filmed these on HD in a variety of mid-sized refillable tanks which we had custom made. Useful elements were keyed out and individual tendrils isolated so that they could be manipulated in a compositing program. In the case of the evil ink pe’a which slides along the bathroom floor to get our lead character Jake (Jason Behr) these filmed tank elements were added to digital layers, creating the illusion that the ink was moving through a puddle of water on the floor.
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To achieve this Albedo used reference created by the film’s very talented tattoo designers to generate a series of 6 or 7 pe’a designs which would each creep along an ink tendril through the floor puddle. A simple, but labour intensive 2D matte painting technique was used to paint these into the shot plate and then reveal them through a series of animated masks. The rest of the ink was real footage of tendrils layered up in a compositing program with countless deformers on them to control their speed and shape. To top it off extra liquid effects and specular highlights were added and some layers were graded red to match in with the blood in the scene.
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| The Singaporean opening sequence. |
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Of the many more straight VFX shots in the film, one interesting shot is from the Singaporean opening sequence. For this opening sequence an exterior pull out shot of the hotel that Jason is staying in was shot from another building on a dolly. Through the editorial process it became necessary for this day shot to be changed into dusk or night, but as this scene had been shot in Singapore it was impossible to simply pick it up. Albedo was called upon to grade it to night and add extra city lights. The original shot needed to be stabilized, but quickly it became apparent that simply stabilizing and tracking the shot was not going to give a realistic result. It was decided to deconstruct the original plate entirely and map the plate’s footage onto 3D geometry to create a new ‘aerial’ camera move. The shot was then able to be used as a story device as it rapidly transitioned from dusk to night. Little touches helped to sell the shot including an airliner flying through the night sky.
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Twelve year old Albedo VFX is a boutique animation, matte painting and visual effects house whose projects include television (Maddigan’s Quest – BBC/TVNZ), feature films (Perfect Creature - Fox, The Climb - Ellipse) and too many Australasian and international commercials to count.
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All images courtesy of Albedo VFX.
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