'Alice' in the land of 1,700 sequences with visual effects

Tim Burton's new film, released last weekend in Spain with great success, involved a quick shoot in just forty days and a long post-production work to include visual effects in more than 1,700 sequences with strange technical combinations and stereographic development since the film was originally shot in 2D.

There is no doubt that when Tim Burton together with production director Rob Stromberg began a new version of Alice in Wonderland They were embarking on one of the most complex projects in recent years. Despite the film's high budget, curiously, due to the busy schedule of some of its protagonists such as Johnny Deep (unconditional in Burton's films - and there are seven projects -), Helena Bonham and Anne Hathway, filming took place in a record time of just forty days at the Culver City studios in Los Angeles.

The live action sequences that open the film were filmed in Cornwall, England. Post-production, on the other hand, lasted for almost a year, developing advanced composition and visual effects techniques, with a great deal of environments, characters and animals developed entirely by computer, with the added complication of stereoscopy.

During the filming itself, some MotionBuilder files were generated, using the physical settings only for the close-ups supervised to the millimeter by Burton himself. The scenes with more action and less presence of actors were closely developed together with the Third Floor company from the moment of pre-production to the composing room where the green chroma was 'dressed'. It must be considered that in this film, practically 85-90% of the filming was carried out in front of a chroma with a tremendously rushed filming, so the team had to ensure they had the precise shots when composing since in most days they barely had time to review the dailies.

Although at first the team studied the possibility of using motion capture, and in fact some shots began to be filmed with these techniques, eventually Tim Burton gradually moved away from this technique to get maximum expressiveness from the real characters. Finally, many scenes combined actors and computer-generated elements and characters in a surreal atmosphere. Many sequences are even shot using only real elements on chromas and embedded on images shot with real actors months before.

Props and even costumes were generated by computer with careful interaction of the characters within the magical environments simulated throughout the film in a huge amount of work entrusted to the company CafeFX, which collaborated in supervising even the smallest detail, but vital in the final development of the project, such as the lighting.

To represent the digital characters on the set, the production team used cardboard cutouts, life-size models or also resorted to men in green with eyes fixed on various parts of the anatomy to help the actors find the correct line of sight interacting with real characters.

In the entire film we only find real sets in the Circular Room and the Red Queen's dungeon, the rest, including the eyes of the Mad Hatter (Johny Deep), were digitally enlarged in size.

Ken Ralston, fundador de Industrial Light&Magic junto a Lucas y supervisor senior de efectos visuales de Alicia, has expressed great satisfaction in "combining different techniques to make the film absolutely unique. I think it is a very visceral experience, almost tangible thanks to the 3D format," continues Ralston. "I want viewers to immerse themselves in that strange world and let the magic take over. Let the characters take them on a really fun journey."

Stereoscopy

Along with all this complex production development, we must add the technical difficulty of stereoscopy. The result is more than satisfactory due in large part to the joint work developed by Imageworks, InThree and Legend3D, betting mainly on a post-production conversion of the 2D filming to 3D, thus resulting in a very non-aggressive stereoscopy that helps sustain a truly immersive fantastic atmosphere, although much less spectacular than the one we perceive in Avatar. In fact, James Cameron has criticized the fact that Hollywood has launched into 3D films that were not initially conceived in 3D "to the detriment of their quality." “The success of Avatar It can make studios believe that it is plausible to convert a film from 2D to 3D in a few weeks, when it is a process that starts long before filming. If you want to make a movie in 3D, shoot it in that format. It is the typical example of Hollywood doing something wrong,” said the director of the film about the little blue men.

Regarding stereoscopy, Tim Burton, who already used the technique of going from 2D to 3D in Nightmare before Christmas, he went on to comment that “the fun part is the artistic part, feeling like you're making a movie and not falling in love with the technology too much,” adding that for him it didn't make sense “to shoot in 3D when there was nothing to record.” "There is good 3D and bad 3D, just as there are bad conversions and good ones. We always knew that it was going to be in 3D so we made the appropriate plan so that when that moment arrived it would be simply another part of the technological process," added the director.

Alice in Wonderland has raised 70% in 3D theaters. In Spain it has been released with 643 copies, 225 of them in 3D and Imax format.