Originally published in 1865, Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” changed forever the course of children’s literature. For director Tim Burton, the prospect of being able to put his own fresh spin on such a timeless classic as “Alice in Wonderland” was impossible to resist. “It’s so much a part of the culture,” he reflects of Carroll’s tale that has inspired numerous stage, television and film adaptations. “So whether you’ve read the story or not, you’ll know certain images or have certain ideas about it. It’s such a popular story.

Underland

“In any fairy-tale land there is good and bad. What I liked about Underland is that everything is slightly off, even the good people. That, to me, is something different.” Tim Burton, Director

“Underland,” says screenwriter Linda Woolverton, “is the same fantastical land that Alice visited as a child. But she misheard the word ‘Underland’ and thought they said ‘Wonderland.’ Now as a girl on
the cusp of adulthood, Alice goes back and there she discovers that the real name of the world
is Underland.” “Everybody’s got an image of Underland,” says Burton. “I think in people’s minds, it’s
always a very bright, cartoony place. We thought if Alice had had this adventure as a little girl and now she’s going back, perhaps it’s been a little bit depressed since she’s left. It’s got a slightly haunted quality to it.” “The thing about Underland, like any fairy-tale land, there’s good and the bad,” Burton says. “The thing I liked about Underland is that everything is slightly off, even the good people. That to me is something different.”

CGI Characters

Using a mixture of visual effects techniques, including actors shot against green screen, all CGI characters, as well as 3D, “ALICE IN WONDERLAND” promises to showcase Burton’s vision in a unique, richly detailed way. Ken Ralston, senior visual effects supervisor on the film, says it was a challenge deciding how to tackle the director’s vision. Ultimately, says Ralston, they decided to “blend a lot of different types of techniques into something that would give us a very unique look for the movie. And it was really based on what it should be based on—what the environments needed to be to best tell the story, what the characters would look like to best tell the story. “I think the film provides a very visceral, exciting, almost tactile experience in the 3D thing that’s happening within these weird worlds,” Ralston continues. “I want to put audiences right in the middle of this strangeness and just let it happen, you know—let these characters take them on this journey which I think will be really fun.”

One of the founding members of George Lucas’ Industrial, Light & Magic, Ralston is a visual effects legend, having worked on the original “Star Wars,” “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,” “Back to the Future,” “Forrest Gump,” “Polar Express,” and “Beowulf,” winning four Oscars®for his pioneering work.

While the live-action sequences involving Alice in the real world that bookend the film were shot on location in Cornwell in England, all the scenes that take place in Underland itself were shot on green-screen stages at Culver City Studios in Los Angeles, with all its environs created entirely digitally in post-production. “This is a very unique project,” says visual effects producer Tom Peitzman. “I’ve been in visual effects for a long time and to have a film like this, where you’re throwing so many different disciplines into one project, makes it that much more fun and unique.”

One of Ralston’s challenges was to enlarge Helena Bonham Carter’s Red Queen head to
twice its size, while keeping her body intact and unchanged. Filmmakers employed a wholly
unique camera system to shoot all of the film’s sequences that involved increasing an element’s size—from the Queen’s head, to the Tweedles’ bodies, to Alice herself when she measured over eight feet tall.

According to Peitzman, the second camera system offered additional lines of resolution. “To blow the Red Queen’s head up larger than normal size, we needed more data. We needed more pixels to be able to make that work.” Ralston adds that scenes shot with the sophisticated camera system had to be carefully shot and later intricately adjusted so that they matched the rest of the film. “And that’s even before the horrifyingly complicated issue of blending the Queen’s neck into her costume.” Certain precautions needed to be observed while shooting the Red Queen. “If she puts her hand up in front of her face and we enlarge her head, she’s got a huge hand crossing her face,” reveals Ralston, who was on set every day. “Each shot I had to watch for situations like that.”

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