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n n n n Animation response. I think he was entertained with it, and we went down that path for a while.” Af- ter Burton finished filming, though, he asked for a subtler performance. “He didn’t want Roger Rabbit against the human performances,” Schaub says. “He wanted to be sure all the characters were in the same world. So we started going more and more subtle. Nothing overacted. Just the bare minimum to make the point.” Te Cheshire Cat, for example, one of the All the animals in Alice are CG, including this bloodhound cuddled by Anne Hathaway. Imageworks used cloth simulation to help make his floppy ears and loose skin believable. Instead, the riggers created simpler rigs for what they knew the character would do, rather than for anything a character could do. “We don’t rig for every eventuality and carry all that stuff around,” Schaub says. “We have a rigging team ready to build one-off features on a shot- by-shot basis.” Te Bandersnatch provides an example of such a one-off rigging solution. “He has a bear body and a bulldog face, with shark’s teeth,” Schaub describes. “Te teeth pierce his lips, which was already tricky from a rigging per- spective. When he licks Alice’s wound, we had a one-off rigging solution to get his big tongue through the teeth.” Similarly, when they realized the horse needed to talk, riggers built solutions only for the phonemes they needed for that specific dialog, rather than a rig that would allow the At left, precomp artists frame the Knave of Heart’s (Crispin Glover) head within a CG environment. At right, the final image shows the Knave’s seven-and-a-half-foot CG body attached to the head and the environment fully textured, lit, and rendered. Director Tim Burton filmed most of the movie on greenscreen stages. In the film, the actors appear alongside CG characters in CG environments. Knowing this project would be shown in stereo 3D, the crew on Alice considered shooting the live- action elements with a stereo 3D camera, at first. “We started that way, but once we realized how much photo Like No Place on Earth manipulation we’d do, we knew we couldn’t use a standard HD camera,” says Sony Pictures Imageworks visual effects supervisor Carey Villegas. “At the time, there were no 4K stereo camera rigs on the market.” But, they wanted to use a 4K-reso- lution camera so that in postproduction, they could scale some elements down to HD resolution and leave others, such as the Red Queen’s head, large. Moreover, says senior visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston, “this is so complex, and to have shot a true 3D movie would 18 March 2010 horse to say anything. For the animators, the fanciful characters provided some of the most interesting creative challenges. “At first, we had the Dormouse run on its hind legs, and the White Rabbit did the same, Tom and Jerry like,” Schaub says. “We put that in front of Tim [Burton] to see his first characters the team animated, moves its tail to accent the dialog spoken by actor Stephen Fry; it acts like a cat, not a human, even when it floats, appears, and disappears. To create emo- tions for a character with a perpetual grin, the animators played with extremes for the smile. “But much of it is in the eyes,” Schaub says. “As he goes in and out of light, we played up the idea of brightening the eyes. Te iris lights up in a special way that suddenly brings a spirit of life into the character, as well.” Similarly, the animators played Absalom the caterpillar, voiced by Alan Rickman, with a subtle, disdainful attitude. “He wears a little monocle on his squished nose, so we have have caused so much grief. Also, we thought that having stylis- tic control of the conversion would be interesting.” Interesting and tricky. “When you combine CG characters, and environments, and photographic elements, and try to di- mensionalize everything, making everything feel like it’s in the same environment is complicated,” says Corey Tumer, Image- works’ stereo 3D supervisor. The photographic manipulation and scale changes magnified the complexity. Tumer describes one shot by way of example. In it, the Hatter, actor Johnny Depp, is trying various hats on the Red Queen, Helena Bonham Carter. Carter’s head is twice its normal size, and Depp’s eyes are larger than normal, too. The Red Queen is looking into a mirror. Her back is to the camera; we see her re- flection. On screen right, courtiers photographed by a second- unit team speak to the Red Queen. The environment is CG