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n n n n Animation him look down his nose at Alice,” Schaub says. “We make sure his body undulates as he talks and exhales, so you can feel a gelati- nous movement in time with the dialog, all through keyframe animation.” Te tense and nervous March Hare was one of the last characters the team nailed. “Tim [Burton] described him in a way that remind- ed me of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times,” puchin monkeys are bellboys, frogs are wait- ers, and flamingoes are mallets for a croquet match. A fish butler scoots around on its tail. Most of these characters have fur or feathers, or wear clothing, and the studio has been working on these modeling, grooming, and simulation problems since Stuart Little. “We’ve settled into a blend between hair and feathers that we call ‘furthers,’ which are like fat book. “Even though he looks like he should be able to fly, we make sure he can’t,” Schaub says. While Alice confronts the Jabberwock, a battle rages in the background between the red and white knights. Inspired by chess pieces, the white knights look like human figures with alabaster armor, which put the studio’s render- er to the test. “Tey’re translucent, so we used subsurface scattering in Arnold,” Phillips says. “It looked very cool when it was done.” Te wide and thin red knights, by contrast, look like playing cards and are made of slightly bendy, interleaved steel plates. “Everything in the battle is CG,” Schaub says. “We had animators tear loose with lots of battle business.” Libraries of fighting characters created by the animators powered through the battle with help from the studio’s own crowd animation software. Te combination of familiar techniques, (Top left) Animators used the Cheshire Cat’s tail to help emphasize the dialog for this character, which has a perpetual grin. (Top right) The tense and nervous March Hare is about to lose control once again. Schaub says. “We emulated Chaplin’s funny walk for a while, and gave [the Hare] a ner- vous twitch. And then, we pulled back.” Te animators put the tense creature on all fours and had it hop like a hare, but every once in a while, it has a big nervous spasm. Many of the CG animals are under the Red Queen’s rule. She hates them and proves it by using the animals as furniture, tools, and servants. Flying birds hold up chandeliers, ca- pieces of hair,” Phillips says. “We do the major- ity of feathers that way, although flight feath- ers on the wings are geometry. For the blood- hounds, we did a cloth-like simulation on the skin to get the jiggle, and for his ears.” One of the most impressive CG creatures in the film is the Jabberwock, which Alice must confront at the end, and which the team based on John Tenniel’s illustrations of the dragon- like animal in the original Alice in Wonderland with photographed props—hats, hat stands, and furniture. CG monkeys hop around and give photographed hats to Johnny Depp on screen left. To create this shot, the pre-composition team cleaned up the photographic elements for the Hatter and the Red Queen shot on greenscreen stage, scaled the Queen’s head, added the courtiers, and framed the shot. The stereo team added dimen- sion, but it was a mix-and-match, back-and-forth workflow. For example, to give the photographed courtiers dimension, the stereo team gave the pre-comp team a scene with stand-ins and a stereo camera. The pre-comp team projected the photo- graphed images onto simple shapes, a pair for each image (one for the left eye, and one for the right). The stereo team then con- verted those shapes into more detailed geometry, a technique they used throughout the film for photographed elements—the Red Queen and the Hatter in this scene, Alice in other shots, and so forth. “We swap in shapes to give us curvature, such as a shoulder that protrudes, a nose, a huge belly, and then re-project the im- age and warp it to fit,” explains Tumer. Similarly, they projected the photographed hats onto 3D shapes when the CG monkeys pull them off the hat stand. “As the monkeys hopped across the screen, it felt as if they walked through one of the hat stands,” Tumer says. “So we ani- mated a stereo camera to cheat them forward, and then animat- 20 March 2010 challenged by creative designs with new tech- niques developed to handle the photographic manipulation and hybrid blends unique to this film, made working on Alice in Wonder- land an amazing adventure for the crew. “After all these years doing so many movies, this might be the most creative thing I’ve ever done,” Ralston says. “And maybe the most fun. It’s been a blast.” n Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net. ed it back to get the connection with the Hatter.” Multiple stereo cameras with specific interocular and conver- gence settings came in handy throughout the film. In this scene, the Red Queen, Hatter, and props have one set of stereo cam- eras. The courtiers have another. The CG monkeys have a third. Similarly, when CG characters surround Alice, she has her own set of stereo cameras and the characters have another. “I originally thought I would use one set of cameras and it would be fine,” Tumer says. “But I found that the projected ele- ments are so flat to begin with, if I overdo the stereo for them, it helps sell the shot and you no longer feel like they and the CG elements are two separate things.” –Barbara Robertson