this should be sticky since its something people do once in a while.
right, there was a video i saw on youtube once for a band i cant remember the name of for a song i cant remember the name of. i just remember it was alot of motion tracking in it since it was a guy sitting in a semi darkish room with a moth fluttering in the corner and as the video progresses there are tattoos growing on his skin in a sort of tribal patterns
I think this is in one of the Ballistic books… it was MR I think. I have it at home. I’ll email myself a reminder…
Maybe this is not what you’re thinking of… it sounded the similar.
the piece I was thinking of was Longmen’s Fall revisited by Loic Zimmermann
http://cghub.com/images/view/14847
but this looks like full character animation, not mocap. sry
im talking about a music video. its got that chris cunningham feel to it. and the guy looked to be late 40’s mid 50’s
it was an english band called massive attack
or possibly a side project by the lead guy from massive attack whose stage name funnily enough is 3D
check out teardrop by the same band another great vid
yeah. i know teardrop. butterfly caught is the right video. wanted to look again at the ink forming on the skin. love the effect. does anyone know who did it and what racking software was used?
ive searched everywhere and still cant find what production company did this or what software was used to track the face
Not sure if this really helps but apparently it was done by Glassworks out of the UK. Here are a couple links that might help you in your quest. 
http://www.glassworks.co.uk/index.php?link=description&job=176
sweet anything helps. i was going to try to do it with some AE tracking to a 4 corner gradients and use dome displacement maps generated from that and do my own technique. sorry for not doing the tutorial on a piston engine tutorial i just never got a screen capture tutorial software that worked for me.
Anything can do it elf, I’d say the guys might have match moved that. I did something similar a while back (a static tatoo rather than animated but the tracking is the same) and you can roto it or track off skin blemishes. Since the shots are all slow moving and not exactly long I’d say a lot of this was done in 2d with warping.
the main reason i said it was tracking was that there is lip and facial movement and the tattoo still sticks
Getcha - the matchmovers in london are very good though and you could definitely track the mouth to drive some warps. Often they’ll go back to a dumb brute force approach when nothing more sophisticated works. Tracking in 3d is a little awkward due to the flesh deforming quite a bit in ways that are too subtle to pick up (unless you’re digital domain)
or weta, or ilm