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Fairy Good T his past year, Prime Focus orchestrated massive naval battle sequences for Red Cliff, engineered destructive nanomites for GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, gave Edward Cullen a Vampire sparkle in The Twilight Saga: New Moon, and designed 3D stereo- graphic displays for Avatar. The studio rounded out 2009 with a little lighthearted fun by turning Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson into a magical childhood icon for director Michael Lembeck’s Fox release Tooth Fairy, which hit theaters in early 2010. In the movie, Johnson plays Derek Thompson, a Prime Focus created a range of visual effects for the fi lm Tooth Fairy, including fairy wings, magic dust, and the surreal swirling vortex in the image above. violence-prone hockey player with a reputation for separating opponents from their bicuspids, earning him the nickname “Tooth Fairy.” An unbeliever of magic, Derek is punished for his cynicism by having to spend a two-week sentence as a real tooth fairy, complete with tights, a tutu, and wings, all the while trying to hide his new appendages from his girlfriend. Prime Focus was one of the primary visual effects vendors on Tooth Fairy, contributing 90-plus shots, the majority of which involved fairy dust simulations ranging from simple magic wand dust to a gigantic dust vortex that serves as the portal between our world and the fairy universe. The VFX team also created the majority of the CG fairy wings and handled some digital double and matte painting shots. Art-Directing Fairy Dust Creating the fairy dust was an interesting challenge for the team at Prime Focus. Director [Michael Lembeck] was looking for something beautiful and physical, yet magical, and the diffi culty was in fi nding that balance. According to Chris Harvey, visual effects supervisor at Prime Focus, the crew experimented with hundreds of simulations, varying colors and quantities of sparkle versus powder and gravity. “Of course, there was the somewhat humorous yet very real concern that we didn’t want to end up creating something that would spawn playground injuries caused from kids throwing things in each others’ faces!” he says. The artists designed several kinds of fairy dust for the movie— amnesia dust (which comes in handy after a human crosses paths with a fairy), the Fairy Queen’s gold dust, and Derek’s uniquely personal magical dust, for example. These all varied in color scheme, movement, design, level of sparkle versus powder, and how much weight they would have in terms of their own magic movement. The fairy dust sometimes even became its own character. In one scene, Derek transitions from his pajamas into a fairy tutu, and fairy dust particles stream off him and back onto his body to form a new costume. “We were given 10 different plates of Derek 10 USER FOCUS: ANIMATION April 2010 in various stages of wardrobe,” Harvey says. “After lining these plates up and warping them together, we used them to generate particles that stream off or onto Derek, to generate the costume.” There was also one scene in which Derek goes through a personal transformation—he starts believing and is no longer the cynical guy he once was. This empowers him with his own kind of fairy dust, and he gets playful with it, fashioning the parti- cles into a guitar and creating dust that looks like the Northern Lights dancing across the bed of his girlfriend’s daughter. “Some of the most fun we had was during the fairy dust look- development,” says Harvey. “Our artists set up a mini stage, where we spent a day shooting several cases of baby powder and Kraft glitter thrown in people’s faces—most notably mine.” This generated lots of HD reference footage for how the dust and glitter moved and caught the light. Creating the Magical Fairy Wings The artists also created the majority of digital wings for the fi lm’s lead fairy characters. These had to integrate seamlessly into scenes in which the actors were wearing practical wings, with a lot of cutting back and forth. Like the fairy dust, each character’s wings had their own unique personality and char- acter, and Derek had two sets—smaller wings when he was a newbie fairy, and as he grows more powerful, super wings. “We went through a number of iterations during look-devel- opment, creating concept art all the way through to modeling, lighting, and rendering different animation styles. Some designs being considered included wings that were more muscular hockey-player type wings, or wings reminiscent of tattoo art,” Harvey explains. Harvey counts the group fortunate to be working with fi lm- makers who were particularly collaborative, and gave the artists a lot of input in terms of the creative direction. “We’d do the wings, and then the fi lmmakers would show our wings to the studio for sign-off,” he says. “In the end, after that process of discovery, however, the fi lmmakers opted to stick with having