Peeling back the skin on the show to reveal the roots of the Cody clan’s crazy-bad behavior, we saw that the complexity of the characters– the tension, dark humor, love and codependency of their interactions, all stem from family matriarch Janine “Smurf” Cody’s messed-up (and even Oedipal) bond with her boys. 

Looking for the right concept to communicate this, we honed in on an episode where Smurf gets a tattoo. That tattoo, and the actual tattooing procedure were the perfect symbols for Smurf’s imprint on her boys. Permanent, painful, poison, she’s literally injected herself under their skins.

Shooting the making of a tattoo in extreme slow-motion close-up, we captured the rippling pucker and dimple of skin as the needle moved in and out. Black ink pooling with every stitch, a fat heart swells in the needle’s wake, the boys’ names curled around it.

In between the tattoo scenes, we wove imagery that relates to the boys’ childhood and their transition to fully realized men. A worm wriggles on a fishhook. A woman sucks a bright red popsicle. Meat goes through a grinder. A woman kisses a scraped knee.  All of that, plus flashes of surfing, skateboarding, fighting and lovemaking. The surfing scenes were provided by Wells, leaving us to gather the rest in a three-city, seven day shoot.  In all? We edited hundreds of hours of footage down to the finished minute-long sequence.