The red phone was flashing so I sighed and popped my martini down on the edge of the pool.

Hello Fire Horse Studio..
"Yeah hi, it's Rob from Atlab here, I've got a little effect I need doing."
Great stuff..
"It's a title for a film by director Andrew Kotatko.."
Lovely..
"It stars Hugo Weaving and Abbey Cornish"
Excellent..
"The title forms out of some cigarette smoke".
Hmmmmn..

We've done smoke before, it's often a beastly process which requires luring your audience into suspending their disbelief while you tread a tightrope over it juggling with one hand tied behind your back but hey we're Fire Horse Studio and we love a challenge.

When ILM created the dinosaurs for Jurassic Park they had the advantage that no one has ever seen a living breathing T-Rex.

It's a different matter when you are animating something we are all familiar with like smoke, which never forms readable words.

The brief was simple but demanding:
1. It has to look and behave like smoke
2. It has to be readable

As a starting point, we wanted to shoot some real smoke footage but, there being no budget for this we set about solving a smoky look for a few days before taking the job on.

In the end it was a combination of Mental Ray volumetric shaders After Effects fractal cloud plugins, XSI Particles and footage from the Fire Horse Effects Library that gave us our look.

The shot we were given had barely any sign of smoke from the real (and lit) cigarette so we added a few plumes and wisps into it from the start to pave the way for the effect to come.

In Softimage XSI 3.5 we created a chute and tracked the narrow top end of it to Hugo's lips. This gave us a surface down which we could deform a grid textured with some fractal smoke.

One layer didn't quite cut it so we added a couple more passes with different textures to play with in the mix.

The final blend
In the quest for the perfect smoke cloud an ingenious XSI Scripted Operator was developed by in house programming guru Chris Gardner.

This enabled us to link the proximity (nearness) of a master model to a given parameter of another object or group of objects, in our case, the scale of some spheres.

The spheres were filled with fractals which generated the smoky cloud for the main layer.

Letters
These were the source of most effort and experimentation; from particles to geometry and every combination of the two.

In the end, we used hand drawn letters (with the trusty Wacom tablet) which were brought to life with carefully tweaked After Effects distortion Plugins, then applied as textures to grids in XSI and finally revealed by travelling mattes in the comp.

WISPS
Mental Ray volumetric cigarette smoke applied as textures to animating grids in XSI. Only a few were needed to give the subtle impression that the letters were formed from the swirls within the cloud.

Having amassed several smoke layers, our Work In Progress After Effects comp had grown into a fairly complex affair, containing 11 nested comps.

We were confident that we had achieved the smoky look we were after but now it came time to address the second half of the brief - Readability.

This turned out to be a delicate balance because mixing up the lettering for the sake of readability also revealed the "strings" of the effect. Finally we arrived at a point where all involved felt we had got the shot nailed.