“DIVE IN COLOR”

We’ll start our tale at a casting session in conference rooms at the Georgian hotel in Santa Monica, Ca. It was 5 hours in and we’d screened 50 or 60 models, and with 40 names left on the schedule, we were half way through the day. Bikini wearing models arrived in waves of 2 to 4 about every 10 minutes. Most of the girls had done this a zillion times; and, although discrete and not trying to flaunt their wears, are were a little amused when an ogling conventioneer or two walked into walls as they tried to sneak a peek.

Strange Questions Arose– Things like how does the fin fit her torso? Are her eyes well enough spaced to be proportional with the mask? Or my personal favorite, What do you think she will look like when we turn her purple

To Photoshop or Not To Photoshop– Some may say, “We’ll fix it in post.” Our motto, “Get as much as you can in camera.” Plus, the layouts were very well detailed, which really aided in planning the execution. We decided to shoot the non-tattooed eye with heavy mascara, knowing that the tattoo and eyelashes would need to be worked in post. Also, we had a few custom Tusa pendants fabricated in various sizes. We needed to be sure that we would have options. It worked out perfectly as we had the perfect size pendant for a simple rack focus to pull the focus we needed. Made the composite work super clean in allowing the pendant to perfectly register on our model Simone’s neck. That saved us a bunch of system time budget to focus on the more difficult element of creating the fish tattoo.

The “Purple Girl” treatment needed to feel as if our girl (Lee) had just arisen out of the water, shimmering skin and all. We did a few tests of Lee’s skin with and without body paint. We found that a Photoshop manipulation alone gave us very flat skin. So to create a shimmering purple skin, we needed to paint Lee purple to create a skin asset.

AND THE HERO OF THE DAY GOES TO?– Not only did Lee withstand crazy amount of prepping, she let us paint her purple. Well at least the front half of her. And always with a smile. Lee, you rocked the day!

Wrap, Take and Off To Post– It took several rounds of revisions in finalizing the campaign. But in the end we all reaped the rewards of a fantastic collaboration with client, talent and crew.

THANKS TUSA FRIENDS!