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Overseeing all this was visual effects super- visor Angus Bickerton, whose credits include The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons. “It was a huge task, as we were dealing with an- imated characters such as Aslan and Reepicheep, all the water scenes, and the cli- mactic battle at sea,” he reports. It did help that Moving Picture Company already had created an animated Reepicheep for the last film.“That’s why we also went back to Framestore as they’d done Aslan before,” says Bickerton. “All their fur-rendering was further revised and improved from the last two films. But MPC had to deal with a huge amount of water effects for the Dawn Treader and sea ser- pent in the final battle scene.” Apted and Bickerton agree that the most difficult effects sequence to do was the sea battle at the end,“which has been the last thing to arrive,” notes Apted. “It’s very heavily computer-driven, with all the water and the serpent and Reepicheep with the dragon and so on. It was tough to shoot, and we spent a lot of time — over 18 months — doing previz on it, as it had to be so precise, and there was a lot of 2nd unit work too and we were all doing bits and pieces of it and needed to keep it all in order.We had this massive real boat, but we did all the battle stuff in the stu- dio, so we were in this sort of blue box with our big set, and slightly flying by the seat of our pants, as you didn’t really know what you were getting. All the stuff I shot and the 2nd unit was pretty mini- mal, and the real story was in all the visual effects. MPC did most of it. Then other places worked on the water, so that was tricky, when different vendors do different parts of the same shot.” To create the seascapes, the team blended plates of the real ocean and a boat doubling for the Dawn Treader shot at sea with CG water using the latest versions of Flowline VFX by Scanline.“So we got real sea-plates with real water wake, and then put the CG Dawn Treader on top of those,” Bickerton explains. “So for the first 80 per- cent of the film, it’s all real water.Then the last two reels use CG water. MPC used Flowline for the big serpent battle, and The Mill, who did a few shots, used RealFlow software. Framestore created the giant continued on page 41 Alice in Wonderland’s visual effects were created by Sony Imageworks. www.postmagazine.com January 2011 • Post 27