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Animation n n n n L isten to the visual effects crew at Sony Pictures Imageworks who worked on Disney’s Alice in Wonderland describe postproduc- tion for this film, and you’d think director Tim Burton had dropped them down a rabbit hole, too. “I like doing something different, and this film begged to use bizarre techniques that we haven’t done before,” says Imageworks’ senior visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston, who counts an Oscar for the pioneering film Who Framed Roger Rabbit among the five he has won for best visual effects. “Everyone was not normal,” says Carey Villegas, referring to the live-action characters in the film. “We scaled or manipulated every- one in some way.” Villegas was one of two VFX supervisors who worked with Ralston on Alice. Sean Phillips, the second visual effects supervisor, adds, “I’ve never seen anything like this before—mixing and matching a wacky blendo of stylized photography with CG characters. We’ve done that on a small scale, but never before had a CG character next to a live-action character next to one with a CG head next to one scaled up or down, all having a conversation together. We had to make them live inside that stylized world and not get lost in it.” And this time, they had themselves to blame, at least in part, for the wackiness. R We’re All Mad Here alston, who joined the project before Burton had finished the script, worked with the director to design what became the “wacky blendo” look of the film. “We decided we didn’t want to go down an all-mocap look, like Beowulf,” he says. “We wanted to see the actors.” And with a cast like this, it’s no wonder: Johnny Depp (Mad Hatter), Mia Wasikowska (Alice), Helena Bonham Carter (Red Queen), Anne Hathaway (White Queen), Crispin Glover (Knave of Hearts), and Matt Lucas (Tweedledee and Tweedledum). “Tim [Burton] wondered what we could do to put actors in a limbo area, where they were not quite real, but real,” Ralston says. So, Ralston worked with artists at Sony Pictures Imageworks and character designers Michael Kutsche and Bobby Chiu, who he found after an Internet search, to give Burton interesting ideas. Te team decided to enlarge Johnny Depp’s eyes, swell Carter’s head and shrink her waist, and fiddle with color timing for Anne Hathaway. Tey sat Crispin Glover’s head on a tall CG body, and pasted Matt Lucas’s face on two digital Tweedles. “When we started, Tim [Burton] wanted to be sure we didn’t just have live-action actors in From the top down: Wooden frogs painted green give Helena Bonham Carter a proper eye line on set. Imageworks filmed Carter’s head at 4K resolution, shrank her body to HD resolution, and blended the two. The frogs, birds, and monkeys are CG; the courtiers are filmed elements. At bottom, once animated, the animals get fur, feathers, and textured skin. At left, the final image. ©2010 Disney Enterprises, Inc. a virtual world with CG characters,” Villegas says. “We did all that manipulation to bridge the gap and bring the two worlds together.” Te only real person is Alice, in that the artists didn’t manipulate her image, but she’s never the same size twice. In addition to photo manipulation, Imageworks created some 30 CG characters, in- cluding the White Rabbit, Cheshire Cat, Jabberwock, Bandersnatch, the Red and White Knights, March Hare, and more—every creature in the film that isn’t human is animated. Artists in the studio blended all these CG characters with the manipulated shots of the actors and the photo/CG characters inside virtual environments. Ten, they converted everything into stereo 3D. And all on a short schedule. “I’m always amazed by the sheer volume,” Phillips says. “We had 1700 shots with fully fleshed-out CG environments, and we had a year to do the whole thing.” Among the tools used by artists at Imageworks were Autodesk’s Maya and Mudbox for modeling, rigging, March 2010 13