"Bakemono" was a short horror film written/directed by my friends Jorge and Sumire.  You can check it out on ALTER  youtube channel:

For the film I got to work on an effect of a girl possessed by the Japanese daemon "Bakemono" turning into smoke and disappearing.

I contributed just a couple of shots, however particularly enjoyable aspect of the project was in being able to interpret the creative brief,  doing some research, and  developing the look of the simulated smoke that invoked the appearance of Bakemono in traditional Japanese prints/ink drawings.

Check out this image of Bakemono (from wikipedia).    

How would you describe the monster using a few words? Some words that came to mind were: "bulbous" "eyes" "claws" "spiky " . I tried to bring out some of the bulbous qualities in the look of the smoke (not sweating mushroom-y edge detail as we tend to do) and added smoky eyes/teeth for emphasis on final few frames of the effect.    The cue for the smoke coursing along the veins was taken directly from the excellent work of the makeup artist. 

Software: Houdini for Effects, Nuke for final composite.

Character Masks: Smoke density was accumulated in a post-pyro-sim solver over time and then used to to gradually mask out the character in favor of the clean plate.

Hair!    Oh man..  dont get me started on hair..  On set the guys ran a fan to emphasize the transition, and blow Claudia (the actress' hair backwards) -- very nice touch! , but now I had to dissolve the hair into smoke, on a budget! Recreating with CG Hair was not in the cards. I created the initial hair mask by using Nuke's "Smart Vector" tool that tracks moving masses pretty well.  (Probably there's more than one way to create a mask for hair I just remember I had problems pulling a key for some reason). Then I re-created the same mask in 3d space (using houdini's traceSOP)  and used that to emit black smoke (like the color of the actresses hair.  Then same accumulation technique described above was used to render out a mask for removal of the hair.

Here's a  little breakdown I made for the effect: (fun fact:  we did scan Claudia at a very high-end 3d scanning facility: "McDonalds" ;) (Using an IPHONE 13).   The scan did prove useful for recreating dimensions of the character, I also wound up building /animating some rough match-move geometry as you can see in the breakdown.