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The International Journal of Motion Imaging

32 Down the Rabbit HoleDariusz Wolski, ASC crafts whimsical images for Alice in Wonderland

48 Weapons of DeceptionBarry Ackroyd, BSC takes aim on Green Zone

60 The Final Frontier in 3 DimensionsJames Neihouse trains astronauts to shoot in Imax for Hubble 3-D

72 Sundance 2010: Expanded PalettesThis year’s artful indies employed a variety of formats

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On Our Cover: Alice (Mia Wasikowska) returns to the magical world of her childhood adventure in Alice in Wonderland, shot by Dariusz Wolski, ASC. (Photo by Leah Gallo, courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc.)

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32 April 2010 American Cinematographer

Down theRabbit

HoleDariusz Wolski, ASC adds

dimension to Tim Burton’s Alice inWonderland, a blend of live-actioncinematography, visual effects and

3-D post techniques.

By Michael Goldman

•|•

www.theasc.com April 2010 33

As Tim Burton’s team plowed downthe home stretch while finishingthe 3-D fantasy Alice inWonderland, director of photogra-

phy Dariusz Wolski, ASC waxed philo-sophical about having a somewhatatypical role on a strange project thatsome might consider a distant cousin ofAvatar. “This is one of those modernmovies that makes it really hard todefine the role of the cinematographer,”he observes. “It’s a film that reallydefined itself during preproduction.When we started, we had no ideaexactly how we would make it.”

The project’s schedule, budget,ambitious visual effects, unique designand stereoscopic-exhibition require-ments, when combined, were notconducive to a traditional cinematogra-phy process — nor to adopting a nativestereo-capture method. Burton and hiscollaborators decided that the imagerythey had in mind could best beconstructed through a continuallyevolving, communal effort in whichboundaries between the camera andvisual-effects departments were oftenblurred. Wolski and his crew capturedactor performances on a series of green-screen stages at Culver Studios inCulver City, and then senior visual-effects supervisor Ken Ralston and ateam at Sony Pictures Imageworks setUni

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Opposite: Yearsafter her originaladventure, 19-year-old Alice(Mia Wasikowska)revisitsWonderland andits eccentric castof characters. Thispage, top: Thesequence inwhich Alice re-enters themagical realminvolvedextensive sizeand perspectiveshifts as thecharacter bothshrinks andgrows. Middle:CinematographerDariusz Wolski,ASC (far left),Wasikowska anddirector TimBurton check outthe set. Bottom:Although thissection of the filmalso requiredextensive digitalmanipulation, itwas also one ofthe few scenes inWonderland thatwas partly shoton traditional setpieces, allowingthe growthillusion to beachieved in-camera.


about blending that material with all-CG environments and characters, insome instances digitally altering theactors’ faces and bodies in the process.Key collaborators were the virtual artdepartment, led by production designerRobert Stromberg; Sony PicturesImageworks stereographer CoreyTurner and visual-effects supervisorsCarey Villegas and Sean Phillips; andthe digital-intermediate team atCompany 3, led by colorist StefanSonnenfeld.

Burton recalls that the approach

didn’t bubble to the surface until late inprep, and even then, he says, it “often feltlike we were making it up as we wentalong, which is not the best way to do it.But because we were mixing technolo-gies heavily and dealing with a shortshooting schedule [50 days of principalphotography], it was inevitable. It wasfun to experiment and try differentthings, but it was a very strange process— almost the opposite of making atraditional film, in the sense that wedidn’t see what we had until the end.”

Although Alice shares some

prominent similarities with Avatar,Burton’s film took a different track, notonly because his project’s time andfinances were comparatively modest,but also because he wanted to workorganically with a sizable cast, whichincludes Johnny Depp (as the MadHatter), Helena Bonham Carter (as theRed Queen) and Mia Wasikowska (asAlice). Burton rejected an all-motion-capture approach but fell in love withthe notion of exotic, all-CG environ-ments and extensive scale and perspec-tive manipulations within the frame.Thus, shooting the movie digitally on agreenscreen stage eventually ripenedinto the only feasible option.

However, Burton also wantedwhat he calls “a vast movie.” He wantedto honor some of Lewis Carroll’s iconicimagery and yet “do [it] in a way thathas never been seen before.” He elabo-rates, “We wanted to show thatWonderland has fallen on hard times abit, and we also wanted to use color toestablish each character — each has itsown kind of color scheme, in a way.That informed our approach and gaveus something to hang onto while deal-ing with greenscreen all day long.”

! Down the Rabbit Hole

Aliceapproaches

the rabbit holethat will sendher tumbling

back toWonderland.

This portion ofthe film wascaptured on35mm film.

www.theasc.com April 2010 35

Throughout prep, the filmmakerspresumed they would shoot Alice innative stereo. Thus, Wolski spent severalweeks testing the Fusion 3-D CameraSystem developed by Vince Pace andJames Cameron and used on Avatar(AC Jan. ’10). Wolski says those teststaught him and Burton a great dealabout composing imagery to achievethe correct depth, camera moves andperspective for a big-screen stereopresentation, but, at the end of the day,they concluded they wouldn’t have thetime to set up the infrastructure neces-sary to shoot high-end native stereo.Because their “live” characters would becomposited into a wide range of CGenvironments at Imageworks, the film-makers decided to ask Imageworks toalso apply its dimensionalizationprocess — to transform the 2-D imagesinto 3-D in post. “We studied examplesof 2-D movies that had been turnedinto 3-D and agreed the results lookedamazing,” recalls Wolski. “So, at the lastminute, we decided to achieve 3-D inpost. But the tests we shot with theFusion rig were helpful, because theyenabled us to understand the wholeconcept of convergence, how to designthe space and so on. They helped us

The Cheshire Cat(top) and theBlue Caterpillar(middle) are twoof the offbeatcreatures whogreet Alice. Sony PicturesImageworkscontributed avariety ofcomplex CGcreations.Bottom: AliceexploresWonderland’sforest, one of the settings filled withextremelydetailed CGscenery conjuredby Burton and productiondesigner RobertStromberg.Taking advantage ofprevisualizationtools, Strombergwas able to helpBurton visualizeWasikowska’smovementswithin the show’s virtualenvironments.


keep a 3-D image in the back of ourminds while we were shooting.”

After deciding on a 1.85:1 aspectratio, the filmmakers took a mixed-format approach to acquisition,mingling high-definition video with 4Kdigital capture and 35mm. Panavision’sGenesis was the primary tool, and theDalsa Evolution 4K camera was used toacquire plates for some visual-effectswork. The film’s opening and closing“bookends” were shot on 35mm tocreate a visual distinction betweenAlice’s world above ground and thescenes that occur after she falls down therabbit hole.

Wolski notes that at the time —late 2008 — Sony’s F35 was not yetavailable, so the only Sony HD systemhe considered was the F23. “I think theresolution of the F23 is better than thatof the Genesis, but it has a smaller chip,and I found that wide shots were not assharp as they were with the Genesis,” hesays. “In the tests, I struggled with wideshots, especially when characters worepale costumes and pale makeup in softlight. Shooting against greenscreen, youdon’t have all the sharpness and detailthat comes with shooting a real set.Under those circumstances, I thoughtthe wide shots were sharper with theGenesis.”

! Down the Rabbit HoleTop: The Red Queen

(Helena BonhamCarter) reigns

supreme in hercolorful realm.

Middle: The Queen’scastle, realized as aneye-popping digital

vista. Bottom:Tweedledee,

Tweedledum and theWhite Rabbit are

three all-CGcharacters who

routinely interactwith real actors in CG environments.

Tweedledee andTweedledum were

animated via motion-capture data recordedfrom sensors worn byactor Matt Lucas andhis double, while the

White Rabbit washand-animated.

"


Using two Genesis bodies, thefilmmakers shot raw imagery at -! Gainon the Tungsten setting, recordinguncompressed to Codex Recorders. “Atthe end of each day, the master record-ings on the ‘exposed’ diskpacks, so tospeak, would go to the video-controltruck, where there was an LTO [datatape] transfer station,” explains WayneTidwell, the production’s data-captureengineer. “Masters were laid off to LTOtape for archival and safety backup, andthe discpacks were recycled once the datawas verified. During production, I’dtransfer takes from a scene onto an exter-nal Firewire drive using DNX HD36files. We had about 15 to 20 FireWiredrives cycling constantly to editorial.”

Working with a large set ofPanavision Primo primes and twoencoded 4:1 Primo zoom lenses (alongwith converted Leica lenses for theDalsa), Wolski applied what he hadlearned from testing 3-D rigs. “With 3-D, it’s best to shoot on the wider end,”he says. “Our biggest close-ups were75mm. I don’t think we went longer thanthat.” For scenes depicting Alice’s adven-tures in the rabbit hole — whichcomprise most of the picture — the


Top: The MadHatter (Johnny

Depp) is alwaysready to pour

some tea.Middle: The

White Rabbitjoins the party.

Burton notesthat in his film,

Wonderland has“fallen on hard

times,” which isreflected in the

picture’s colorschemes. Certain

shots weredesaturated

during the DIprocess, but

individualpalettes were

also designed forspecific

characters, soenvironments

tend to brightenup considerably

when Alice isaround. Bottom:

After sipping hertea, Alice shrinks

once again andeventually windsup being stuffed

into a teapot.


camera was on a 30' Technocrane with aLibra head.

One of the filmmakers’ trickiesttasks was determining how to provideplates for shots that showed size and scaleshifts within particular frames; certaincharacters, and sometimes certain bodyparts, were designed to be different sizesfrom other elements in the frame. TheRed Queen, for instance, has a head fartoo big for her body. Likewise, Alice ismore than 8' tall in some scenes and tinyin others. Wrangling those scale changeswas a big challenge and part of a largerparadigm for the movie — virtually everyshot is, one way or another, a visual effect.In fact, Ralston, whose credits includesuch memorable technical achievementsas The Polar Express (AC Nov. ’04) andWho Framed Roger Rabbit? (AC July ’88),calls Alice “the biggest show I’ve everdone,” adding, “It’s the most creativelyinvolved I’ve ever been in this many areasof a major show.”

The team ruled out motion controlfor plates involving shifts in scale becausethat would have required shooting sepa-rate passes, and “Tim wanted to makesure the actors could play scenes together,”says Villegas. “We used a variety of meth-ods to get eyelines correct on set, includ-ing platforms and stilts. Dariusz had theproblem of not knowing how much head-room to leave on various shots becauseTim didn’t know, for example, exactly howbig the Red Queen’s head needed to beuntil we’d put it all together. So Dariuszdecided to just shoot it the way he saw itand let us use our post solution.”


The RedQueen’s

distorted headsize was one of

the movie’smost complexvisual effects.The first stepwas achieved

by shootingCarter on a

greenscreenstage. Dalsa’s4K Evolution

camera systemwas used to

create plates athigh resolution;

this allowed the filmmakers

to enlargeportions of the

frame in postand then

seamlesslystitch those

elementstogether with

images shot atlower

resolutions.

"


That solution involved capturingthose plates in 4K with the DalsaEvolution, which was in the prototypestage at that time. (Ed. Note: Dalsa hassince departed the motion-picture busi-ness.) With the Evolution, the teamcould capture the Red Queen or Alicetogether with other live characters in asingle 4K frame and then scale portionsof the frame up or down while main-taining a high-quality image.

In order to blend Dalsa footagewith Genesis footage, the Imageworksteam had to create software to amelio-rate resolution differences between thetwo: the Evolution’s 4K images were4096x2048, whereas the Genesis’ HDimages are 1920x1080. Still, accordingto Villegas, the Dalsa was a helpfulchoice in the long run. “You can’t blowup footage from an HD camera by 50 to100 percent and maintain the quality weneeded,” says Villegas. “We needed ahigh-resolution camera like the Dalsa,but it had to co-exist with the Genesisin post — we knew we couldn’t havetwo different pipelines for them.

“We wanted to maintain theDalsa’s 2:1 aspect ratio in order to makesure we could use the full raster of theimages Dariusz shot on set,” continuesVillegas. “So we developed a process to


Almost everyscene staged in

Wonderlandwith real actors

was shot ongreenscreen

stages.Environments

were addedlater by

Imageworks,which also

handled theshow’s

stereoscopicconversion

process.

resize the Dalsa images down to2160x1080, approximating the pixelspace of the Genesis. The Dalsa resolu-tion had about 120extra pixels on eachside of the frame, andthat became the basisof those images. So ifwe kept Alice at thenative resolution ofthe 4K camera andcomped her back into a scene of thedownsized Dalsamaterial, we wereeffectively getting an89-percent blowupwithout doing anyresizing.” Imageworksachieved this withproprietary softwarecalled Recompose,which enabled the team to scale piecesof Wolski’s photography up or downand establish a seamless relationshipbetween enlarged portions of the frameand the rest of the frame.

In order for that work to be done,however, Wolski’s crew had to recordlive-action plates to exacting standardson the greenscreen stages. Centralamong their challenges was how to lightgreenscreen delicately and mitigate the

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pervasive green spill. The solution, saysWolski, lay in the shadows, and “wassomething we kind of invented as we

went along.“On a 360-degree

greenscreen stage, thespill goes every-where,” he continues.“If you want big shadows to fall onsome of your subjects,those shadows oftenbecome green becausethere is so much greenspill. So we useddifferent shades ofhigh-quality grayfabrics to create shadows. When wewanted to go realmoody, we used ashade that was almost

black. If it was a dusky day, we used adark gray, and if it was day, we used lightgray.”

Above each greenscreen stage,gaffer Rafael Sanchez and his crewinstalled huge lightboxes to provide softlight. Each source comprised three softboxes containing 32 6K space lightseach, and all three were rigged withchain motors to facilitate extensivemanipulation. This approach gave

“We studied examples of 2-Dmovies that hadbeen turned into 3-D and agreed

the results looked amazing.”

Tweedledee and Tweedledum give Alice conflicting directions to her next destination.

Wolski “great flexibility in shaping thelight,” says Sanchez. “We even hadcontrol of each circuit in every spacelight.” Outside the softboxes, the crewplaced 80 Kino Flos for direct green-screen light, and they also used 20KFresnels on scissorlifts and on theground to build various sun sources thatwould eventually shine in through CGwindows and doors.

“We put silks that had been dyedvarious shades of blue underneath thehuge lightboxes,” says Wolski. “I foundthat digital cameras don’t like red orwarm colors very much, and they tendto go a little pinkish or reddish, so Icooled the whole thing off a bit for acloudy-day look. The silks we usedmost of the time were ! Blue, and wehad one for night scenes that was FullBlue. With the scissorlifts, we couldbring in the 20Ks if we wanted a softsun, a soft glow or a hard sun.”

The nature of the productionmeant that there was no chance for thefilmmakers to view the characters fullyintegrated with their environments onset during the shoot, nor could they takeadvantage of dailies in any useful way.They did, however, utilize a couple ofon-set previsualization systems, accord-ing to Villegas. “We did real-time



Burton’s desireto lend the

movie “epicscope” is

exemplified byscenes in theRed Queen’sthrone room

and duringbattlefield

action that pitsthe Red

Queen’s forcesagainst those

of her rival, theWhite Queen

(AnneHathaway).

keying of the greenscreen into the envi-ronments on set so Tim could view acharacter walking inside the environ-ment she would eventually be in,” saysVillegas. “It was a crude representation,but it did show him how the characterwould move and interact inside a set. Ofcourse, to do a real-time composite of thegreenscreens into theCG environments webuilt on set, we had tocapture the cameramove and replicate it inthe computer.”

This was accom-plished in a couple ofways. First, the teamused General Lift’sEncodacam system toencode dollies andcranes so that on-setcamera moves could berecorded for virtual-camera data. They alsoused InterSense opticalmotion-tracking sensor technology,incorporated into Lightcraft Tech-nologies’ Previzion system, to trackmovement of wild cameras. That data,along with zoom and pan-and-tilt datafrom the Libra head, and other signalscriss-crossing the set, were interfacedthrough a Panavision Panahub.

To give everyone a consistent

visual reference as production movedalong, Wolski pulled frames from theCodex Recorder each day for key scenesand color corrected them withPhotoshop. “Dariusz also set a look-uptable in the Codex for each scene to help with the color timing,” says 1st

AC Trevor Loomis.Wolski notes, “Usingmy LUT [in theCodex], I created abook of prints thatshowed the looks wewanted for all thecrucial scenes, so whenthe effects team wentto do comps, they hadsomething to matchto. I went off for abouta week and justprinted simple photos,adding contrast orchanging color hereand there, to providesimple guidelines foreveryone.”

As elements were capturedonstage or created in Imageworks’computers and then stitched together,Imageworks’ stereo department setabout adding the third dimension.Turner credits the recent feature G-Force, also done at Imageworks, forsupplying a toolset and methodologyfor massaging 2-D footage of live-

45

Stayne (Crispin Glover) leads the Red Queen’s minions into battle.

“It was fun to experiment

and try differentthings, but it was a very strange

process.”

action characters and environmentscombined with CG characters into 3-Dimagery. “G-Force gave us the experienceof transforming 2-D [live-action] platesinto 3-D, so we had a nice backbone tostart the process on Alice,” says Turner.“But Alice posed a different challenge, in

that the primary task was to dimension-alize people. On G-Force, the team wasdimensionalizing mostly objects.”

Both rotomotion and match-move techniques were used during thedimensionalization process for Alice.The chief tools used were customized

animation and compositing software,particularly Imageworks’ customizedversion of Maya 2009, which includes acustom stereo viewer; Imageworks’proprietary compositing software,Katana3-D; Nuke compositing soft-ware (v. 5.1); and Imageworks’ in-house3-D viewing tool, Itview.

Ralston and Turner emphasizethat this effort involved a great deal offinely detailed manual work — so muchso that at press time, as the DI processwas beginning, they were still makingrevisions and tweaks. After the finalgrading session, Turner was slated to doa final convergence pass on the imageryto fine-tune screen depth one last time.“I’ll be looking for depth jumps or last-minute tweaks,” Turner explains. “Atthat late stage, you can’t add more depthto the shot, but you can adjust screenplacement and screen depth. It’s amanual process, and I view it the waythe cinematographer views his role: hehas to frame shots the way the director


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The White Queen promotes a kinder, gentler agenda from her part of the realm.

wants and fluidly hit those points. I dothe same thing, only with depth.”

As the process wound down,Burton conceded it had been a gruelingadventure. He notes there are “somethings I would do differently, but some-times you decide to try something and

get momentum going, and you justneed to go for it. It’s fun to experiment— that’s the joy of filmmaking. Dariuszwas willing to go for it, and so waseveryone else, and we made this moviein that spirit. Somehow, we got it done.”

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