Alice in FX-land

If you saw Tim Burton's version of Alice in Wonderland in the theater, you probably had some idea that a lot of the visuals were tweaked or enhanced through computer animation. Obviously, Helena Bonham Carter's head isn't really that big and Crispin Glover isn't really that tall. But the true scale of what was digitally created for the film is even more impressive than you might think.

IGN had an opportunity to visit with Visual Effects Supervisor Ken Ralston and Animation Supervisor David Schaub at Sony Imageworks in Culver City to learn about their extensive work on Alice in Wonderland and their collaboration with Burton. In a screening room dubbed the "executive sweat box" (not because of the temperature, but because it's where creative teams often present their ideas to executives for approval), we saw how a few of the more extensive sequences were put together and heard directly from Ralston and Schaub about how the looks of main characters were achieved.

Each of the characters required a different approach. Some were completely computer generated, some were created through performance capture, some were just the actors themselves and quite a few were a mixture of all of these techniques. But the most important thing for the effects team was to keep the actors' performances in tact.

"We wanted the actors in there," Ralston says. "I mean, they're sort of humanoid, so we wanted to keep those characters in as much as we could. And you cannot, I don't care what anyone says, you can't do that with a CG head. There are things going on and subtleties that are really part of our primal genetic code that if it's off the smallest amount you go, 'Hey! Something's wrong.' And it can be brilliantly done and it's still a little off. Also, you're missing out on what these guys are doing."

For the Red Queen, Bonham Carter was first filmed in full costume and makeup on a soundstage draped in green screen. Ralston explains the rest of the process: "A month or so later we had to duplicate all these shots with all these background characters, now decided on with costumes and makeup, and do every single shot with a the correct increments – lenses and angles and lighting as best we could. And I think we did it all in six days. And that's including the execution scene, with all those people lined up. So anyway, this crazy way of doing this got us to this point. And we were still working out the size of her head. And her head really does change in proportion from shot to shot, because it felt different each shot, as crazy as it is."

In one scene we saw, the Queen sits on her throne and calls for her fish butler to bring her a drink. Each element of the scene had to be painstakingly created and then layered on top of one another.

"You know what's fun about the movie, for me, is these images are absurd," Ralston says. "They're great. They're twisted and make no sense. And there's a lot going on in a scene like this. How do you have a giant-headed queen holding a glass that the fish is holding, who's not real, in this environment where the only real thing here was her and a portion of the seat she was in? ... The problem with this kind of movie is I could talk about it for a week and I still wouldn't touch on everything."