The whole piece lasts for eight and a half minutes but Cecily only wanted the last three minutes processed so that the audience gets a shock when the black tears start rolling. It was shot in early 2008 on HDCam by legendary Irish cinematographer Seamus Deasy, who has also shot a number of John Boorman's most recent films. The actress was Britta Smith who spent thirty minutes in front of the camera crying real tears.

When I received the footage, I first processed it to remove those pesky HDCam artifacts which make it so difficult to deal with for greenscreen. I also produced a high contrast version of the footage to make it easier to see the delicate tears rolling down her face. I then studied the section I needed to rotoscope and decided to do the work in three parts. There are two sections of tears where she wipes her face half-way through. In the first half, I did each side of the face separately and then in the second half I did the whole face together, mainly because there were less tears to deal with.

With Mocha-AE, I tracked patches of the face along the lines of the tears. There were sometimes three or four patches per tear, depending on how far it slid down the face, and I basically did a dissolve between each patch to keep the tears constantly dark. Once a tracking null was in place, that gave me 80% of the movement. Discreet twitches and movements of the skin meant that a general planar track didn't capture all the detailed movement so when I added the mask shape onto a parented solid, I had to go through frame by frame and line up the mask to get the last 20%. Each tear was individually rotoscoped, with each mask being blurred and faded depending on its underlying movement.

Once all the tears were rotoscoped with transparent solids, the resulting composition was used to cut out an adjustment layer that darkened and desaturated the tear without losing the glinting highlight and natural noise. This process also meant I kept any motion blur in the image. Other changes also included adding dark smudges under the eyes to make it look like the ink is staining the skin.

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There are a number of tears that could do with some trails as the ink makes it way down the face but tracking these slowly dissolving patches onto the face would have been even more time consuming than it actually was. In fact, a better, but more complicated, solution would be to 3D track the face and that would probably allow for more tear marks to remain. However, given the deadline and the fact that I was doing this on my own, the planar tracking was a perfectly good compromise!

When the piece was finished, I delivered on a Blu-Ray disc for projection at the Taylor Gallery in Dublin. I visited the city for the opening and had the pleasure of meeting Seamus Deasy and confessing my admiration for his own work and that of John Boorman. Perhaps one day soon I'll get a chance to go back and meet with Mr. Boorman in person!

This was a really interesting project to do and a considerable challenge. I'm really happy with the result and it makes for a unique experience.

http://www.cecilybrennan.com/