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" These days, every fan knows what Lost&amp;#039;s Smoke Monster is: The Man in Black&amp;#039;s immortal soul, wrenched from his body when Jacob tossed him down the Island&amp;#039;s glowing well of goodness. But when visual effects artists were creating the Island&amp;#039;s really big bad guy, they were as much in the dark as the castaways\u2014and the show&amp;#039;s fans\u2014were.  &amp;quot;The producers were vague about the details, as you can imagine,&amp;quot; says John Teska, who created the smoke monster while working at Eden FX. The team at Eden had worked on various elements of the show&amp;#039;s first season, including crash sequences and digital boars, when Lost&amp;#039;s producers approached them about creating a creature unlike anything audiences had seen before. &amp;quot;This was something we didn&amp;#039;t know about when we started on the show,&amp;quot; Teska says. &amp;quot;So even when there was something that harassed the castaways, there really hadn&amp;#039;t been any talk about what we would be doing until later on that first season.&amp;quot;  Teska worked with Lost&amp;#039;s VFX supervisor at the time, Kevin Blank, on Smokey&amp;#039;s design. &amp;quot;He wanted to have this wisp of smoke that would shoot through the air, or grab and drag characters around,&amp;quot; Teska says. &amp;quot;But he was trying to drive home the point that this is not just smoke. He [and the producers] really wanted to have something with a roiling and writhing kind of look to it.&amp;quot;  Creating the monster posed interesting technical and artistic challenges. Rendering smoky particulate in both 2D and 3D required tons of computing power and lots of time\u2014something that&amp;#039;s always running short on a TV production schedule. Plus, regular smoke simulations couldn&amp;#039;t pull off the look producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse wanted, which required the particles to move both up and down the smoke screen. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s really a very tediously animated computer effect because it has to be random, like smoke, but we have to control it and animate it to give it personality and to make it do what we want,&amp;quot; says Mitch Suskin, who took over as Lost&amp;#039;s visual effects supervisor at the end of season two. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s actually a lot of trial and error to get Smokey to do what we want him to do and still maintain his smoke-ishness without him becoming just a smoky worm.&amp;quot; To pull off the effect, Teska built a polygon-based cone form that not only generates the initial smoke particles but also controls where they go; animators used an interior spine to pose and move the monster. Teska then added textures using fractal noise to create the cloud&amp;#039;s roiling motion. &amp;quot;You can give the particles a definition for how quickly they move and how quickly they turn transparent and dissipate,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;So that main form is what drives all of that particle action and keeps the whole screen from filling with smoke.&amp;quot; Once the monster was rendered and composted into the shot, VFX artists added smoke elements from stock footage to blend on top of it. &amp;quot;It becomes kind of putting salt and spices into your dish,&amp;quot; Teska says. &amp;quot;This feels a little video-gamey, so you add layers of real smoke on top of it so when it&amp;#039;s all meshed together, it has as analog a feeling as possible, even though a lot of the process is digital.&amp;quot; Throughout the entire design process\u2014and even up until his departure from the show after season four\u2014Teska was never really given any hints about what the monster might be, or what drove it. &amp;quot;It helps so much when you&amp;#039;re doing in science fiction to know how is things are assembled or driven,&amp;quot; he says. After the monster debuted, Teska found some interesting inspiration on fan forums that he says actually drove his thinking and decision-making when it came to animating Smokey. &amp;quot;An early theory was that it was an electromagnetic force,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;We know there&amp;#039;s magnetism on the island\u2014could this be some iron filing cloud that&amp;#039;s being driven by the magnetism? And that was something I could grab onto to kind of help activate it when even the producers were being vague about what that was.&amp;quot; Teska wasn&amp;#039;t the only VFX artist to work on Smokey. Bruce Branit of Branit VFX created the first shot of the monster at night, when it attacks Keamy&amp;#039;s team of mercenaries. &amp;quot;We built it from scratch, but we had to follow the look that had already been established,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Since you hadn&amp;#039;t seen the monster at night before, it was a chance to revisit it just a little bit, add some sparks or electrical things inside it.&amp;quot; Branit&amp;#039;s team had to figure out how to make the black smoke cloud stand out at night; they studied the sequence where the monster kills Mr. Eko very closely. &amp;quot;Technically, you can make it look like anything, but there were certain rules that came down artistically from the creators of the show,&amp;quot; Branit says. &amp;quot;It had to stay in one cohesive form, and not break into separate parts, but it could have tentacles. It couldn&amp;#039;t be too wispy, or too solid.&amp;quot; Every time the monster was used on the show\u2014accompanied by its distinctive sound design, created using the repetitive clicking of a cicada and the noises from a New York City taxi receipt printer\u2014the producers would give the animators specific guidelines as to how big it should be and how it should behave. &amp;quot;That way,&amp;quot; Suskin says, &amp;quot;they could communicate to us what the nature of the scene is without really telling us everything we wanted to know about Smokey.&amp;quot; And as technology improved, creating the monster became easier. &amp;quot;It was miraculous just that we were able to do Smokey on a television schedule in season two,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;By season five, we got up to machines that had eight fairly fast cores to process, which meant that what used to take hours per frame sometimes would now only take minutes per frame. So you could experiment a lot more. It still wasn&amp;#039;t a trivial effect, but we had a lot more power to try different iterations and give the smoke a little more detail and a little more life. We much more control over him as time went on.&amp;quot; At least in the visual effects sense. In the narrative sense, it seems like no one can control Smokey. And the guys who know what he&amp;#039;s going to do still aren&amp;#039;t talking\u2014at the press preview for The Vilcek Foundation&amp;#039;s exhibit honoring Lost, neither producer would comment on the finale. &amp;quot;Even as we come to the end, I have mixed feelings about how I want the smoke monster to be motivated or what I think it is,&amp;quot; Teska says. &amp;quot;Now we&amp;#039;re getting into the final stretch and finding out that it might even be soul-motivated, which is something I didn&amp;#039;t see coming. But it&amp;#039;s an interesting touch.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/a5729/anatomy-of-losts-smoke-monster/>