Being Green

The film’s almost entirely virtual environment required the whole cast to act in front of the green screen—a task that proved challenging. “It’s hard because you can’t draw anything from your environment,” says Mia Wasikowska, who portrays Alice. “You have to imagine what it would be like to be in the space.”

“I was told as a child that I had a very fertile imagination,” says the Tweedles’ Matt Lucas. “The implication was that it was something quite negative. But actually it’s really helped me on this job because you have to imagine everything.”

In addition to virtual sets, a number of characters would be created entirely using CGI in post-production, among them the White Rabbit, the Dormouse, the Jabberwocky, the March Hare and the Dodo. During filming, these entirely CGI creations would be represented in a shot by either a cardboard cutout of the character, or a person dressed in green. “I got to act with lots of green people,” says Helena Bonham Carter, who portrayed the Red Queen. “They’re the unsung heroes, all the actors who won’t ever be seen or heard, frankly, because we had a legion of actors in green leotards reading for the other characters. And they’re brilliant. We couldn’t do it without them.”

“Traditionally, in most effects films, you’d say, ‘We’ll shoot the Hatter, we’ll move him out, and then we’ll shoot Alice,’” Ralston says. “Sometimes we have to do that. Other times, when there’s a lot of close interaction between the characters or it’s a really emotional scene, I try to do it all in one.” “If somebody asks me how we did this movie,” says director of photography Dariusz Wolski, “I’d say, ‘Which shot?’”

Once work on the green-screen section was completed, Burton and his editor Chris Lebenzon assembled a rough cut of the film which was handed over to Ralston and his team at Sony Imageworks for them to begin the long process of creating the CG world of Underland and all its animated characters—around 2,500 visual effects shots in total.

“Tim would talk us through each individual sequence, and we’d have big discussions on characters and light,” says Ralston. “Everything imaginable has to be discussed because nothing’s there except for the foundation of some of the performances. It’s an ongoing process, putting our animated characters into scenes at the same time we’re compositing our live-action guys, getting the lighting designs to work, so it all blends together as best as possible. It takes a ton of people. It’ll be hundreds and hundreds of people at Sony. Then on top of all that, we have to add 3D.”

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