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n n n n Animation “We had to reframe most of the shots because of the scaling,” Villegas says. “And, we made those decisions in the pre-comp phase. [DP] Darius Walsky did the initial framing on set, but he was gone by this time. So, we worked with Tim [Burton] and Ken [Ralston].” When the artists had positioned all the char- acters in their final sizes and reframed the shot as if the characters had all been photographed in those sizes, the photographic elements moved on to layout for integration with CG props and the CG environment. From there, the rough compositions moved to animation and stereo layout. “At this point, the pipeline became a little more standard,” Phillips says. For characters like the Knave of Hearts and the Tweedles, which were part-photographed As it turned out, the animators did not use motion-captured data for the Knave of Hearts. “Crispin [Glover] practiced walking on stilts and got it down, but when you translate that into a properly portioned [tall] human, the walk looks funny,” says David Schaub, animation supervi- sor. “So we animated him from the ground up using his performance as reference. It was diffi- cult to animate his body under the head, which was extracted, stabilized, and on a card in Maya. It was the same with the Tweedles.” For the Tweedles, the team mocapped Lucas wearing a padded costume on set. Te anima- tors used that data and reference footage to help perform the two characters’ bodies. “We restricted his movements with a pear-shaped foam suit, so his arms didn’t move past the more complicated for the animators, who need- ed to consider Alice in depth as well. “If a CG character holds hands with a live-action actor in 2D, you can cheat that,” Schaub says. “But in stereo, the depth gives away the cheat.” A Grin Without a Cat! At the peak of production, Schaub led a team of 63 animators: specialists who concentrated on the hybrids, and others who animated the non-human CG characters. “We had so many specialized characters that appear in only a small cluster of sequences, it didn’t make sense to have a team working on them,” Schaub says, “although in the throes of production, it became a melting pot. We had nine months to do the animation.” actors and part-CG, the animators could see photographic elements glued to 2D cards that always turned toward the camera within a 3D scene. “Our biggest rigging challenge was incor- porating the photo-heads,” Phillips says. This Is Impossible To create the Knave of Hearts, for example, animators needed to fit a seven-and-a-half- foot-tall CG body onto Crispin Glover’s mov- ing head. On set, Glover sometimes stood on a platform, and sometimes walked on stilts. He wore a suit fitted with Xsens Technologies’ in- ertial motion-capture system MVN (formerly Moven) to give animators the option of using motion-capture data for his body. “It would have been really hard for the animators not to have had the head in the 3D system,” Villegas says. “Tey needed the system to visualize.” Similarly, when Alice rides a CG Bander- snatch, animators had the live-action photo- graphic element on a card in the 3D envi- ronment. And, for the Tweedles, a card that tracked with Matt Lucas’s shoulders made it easier for the animators to perform CG bodies and place the photographed eyes and mouth on the CG heads. “We aren’t projecting photographs onto geometry,” Phillips says. “We’re trying to ori- ent the geometry to the photographs. But, we gave the animators the flexibility to change the photography if they needed to.” 16 March 2010 At top left, Matt Lucas on the right and a stand-in on the left wear the Tweedle suits for motion capture on set, then switch positions. At top middle, artists apply Lucas’s eyes and mouth to the CG characters and use video from each performance as reference. At top right, animators tweak the body mocap and technical artists add cloth simulation. Above, the final image. limits of the CG character,” Villegas says. “He performed with a stand-in. When Tim was happy with Tweedledee, [Lucas] switched places and became Tweedledum to get facial performances for both characters.” To make those performances believable on the CG characters, the animators worked with fully rigged faces using reference footage as a guide. “Even though we used Matt Lucas’s real eyes and mouth, all the stuff around them needs to move,” Schaub explains. “His eye movements need to pull the skin around the eyes. It looks weird, but in a good way.” Because Alice’s size changes from sequence to sequence, the CG Tweedles often needed to grow and shrink, and stereo made all this even Te characters ranged from the whimsical, fanciful Cheshire Cat to the vicious Bander- snatch, to natural animals like a horse and a bloodhound. “Tim wanted to shoot the movie and not deal with animals,” Schaub says. Riggers started with generic bipedal rigs for the humans, chess pieces, monkey, frog foot- man, and executioner, and with standard rigs for the quadrupeds, such as the dogs, pig, and hoofed creatures. “On past shows, like Narnia, we rigged char- acters so they could do calisthenics,” Schaub says. “No matter how you posed them, they’d be anatomically correct. But it turns out you need only 20 percent of those cases. So gone are those days.”