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n n n n Animation end of the film, with few exceptions, the en- vironments are digital: the mushroom forest where she meets Absalom the CG caterpil- lar and is chased by the vicious CG Bander- snatch, the Tulgey Wood where she meets the CG Cheshire Cat, a big desert environment made from projected matte paintings, the environment around the tea party (that takes place in a set), the ruins of an old temple, the Red Queen’s castle, and more. “Tere are a lot,” Phillips says. “And we had Once Alice arrives in Wonderland, the environments are nearly always CG. The scale of the computer- generated plants in this garden helps us understand that she’s very small. animation, cloth and hair simulation, and some effects; Side Effects Software’s Houdini for effects; Maxon’s Cinema 4D for projection painting; Adobe’s Photoshop for matte paint- ing; Te Foundry’s Nuke, Autodesk’s Flame, and Imageworks’ own Katana for composit- ing; Katana for lighting; and Imageworks’ Ar- nold for rendering. Other studios helping on the project, largely with the stereo 3D conver- sion and environments, were CafeFX, Matte World Digital, Nvizage, and Svengali, with Te Tird Floor providing previs. Come, We Shall Have Some Fun Now Te film begins and ends in Victorian Eng- land, in live-action scenes, but most of the story takes place in Underland, also known as Wonderland, where Alice finds herself, a de- cade after her first fall, once again on a trippy adventure with her wacky childhood friends, all of whom managed to be on set with her during filming. Even the CG characters. “We recorded the animated actors in Lon- don, but we had voice talent on the set to have eye lines,” Ralston says. “Alice is six inches, two feet, eight and a half feet, and, for one mo- ment, 20 feet tall, and then at the end, her normal height. So, the eye lines changed from scene to scene. If we didn’t have the real voices, we had voice talent in green suits.” Because most of the film takes place in CG environments, the sets were green with green props arranged to follow production designer Robert Stromberg’s plans. “We had at least three, 360-degree greenscreen environments 60 feet tall by 300 feet long,” describes Ville- gas. “We had them on rails so we could open and close them as needed. We lived in a green- screen world for many months.” Te actors could view a miniature to see 14 March 2010 what the environment would look like, and when Alice changed sizes, green platforms on set helped the actors have the right eye lines. “Te scales are all nuts,” Ralston says. “It took an awful lot of tweaking.” In one shot, for example, a tall Alice holds the Mad Hatter’s hat. “Mia [Alice] is shorter than Helena [Red Queen], and Alice is supposed to be eight and a half feet tall,” Villegas says. “So we shot Mia on a platform. In post, we scaled everything so her feet touch the ground, but her eye line stayed in the same place.” In another scene, a tiny Alice jumps onto the Mad Hatter’s hat, crawls around the brim, drops to his shoulder, and then the two walk into the CG forest. “We used motion-control photography for that shot,” Villegas says. “It was the only time we shot motion control.” To make the scaling possible, the crew filmed scenes with Alice in odd sizes, all shots with Helena Bonham Carter, whose head needed to double, and other shots involving abnormally sized humans with a Dalsa Evo- lution 4k digital camera; a Genesis HD cam- era handled the rest. By scaling Carter’s body down to HD resolution, for example, they doubled the size of her head, which they had shot at 4k. Actors working with Carter pre- tended her eyes were about two inches higher when they looked at her. Te same technique made Alice shrink and grow. A World of My Own In the film, Alice begins her journey at a gar- den party. Led by the White Rabbit into the forest, she falls down the rabbit hole and lands in a round room, a set built at normal size. Ten, she shrinks to two feet tall and walks into a CG garden that looks like an English garden in disrepair. From that point until the the challenge of using the environments to re- inforce Alice’s size.” When she’s six inches tall, big dandelion seeds float through the environ- ment. When she’s large, she ducks through CG doorways. Te modelers created details based on how close the camera would move, the scale, and the amount of time the charac- ters would spend in the environments. So that Burton wouldn’t be shooting blind in this greenscreen world, Imageworks mod- eled every CG environment before he filmed the live-action actors. “Te idea was that Tim could virtually see the characters in that [digi- tal] environment on set,” Villegas says. To help Burton see Alice and the other char- acters in their Wonderland environments as he filmed the actors, the crew used two solutions for real-time camera tracking. Te EncodaCam sys- tem from General Lift and Brainstorm tracked anchored cameras and inserted characters shot on the greenscreen stage into the backgrounds from the camera’s viewpoint. An optical system developed by Imageworks’ R&D department tracked handheld cameras by focusing on mark- ers in a grid on the ceiling. In addition to giving Burton and his director of photography a way to see the actors in the forest, in the Red Queen’s bedroom, and various other places, Burton’s edi- torial department used the composites as a guide when they cut the movie. What Size Do You Want to Be? Every shot in the film involving live-action photography moved through a pre-composi- tion department led by Villegas. First, though, the matchmovers tracked the camera using the 4k-resolution frames. “Te matchmove sys- tems don’t really know about resolution,” Vil- legas says. “So we could scale the film back and maintain the matchmove.” Once the pre-comp department had the camera, the artists could prep the plates. “On a traditional movie, pre-comp is usually the easy part,” Villegas says. “On this movie, pre- comp is where some of the really hard work was done.” Te artists had to key the characters as usual, and then had to fit the variously scaled live-action elements into CG environments.