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Doing Digital Design

Alice

That’s a good thing, because much of the concept was also used successfully on “Alice in Wonderland.” Unlike “Avatar,” that production did not have a decade or a $300-million dollar budget to get it right. In fact, it had a very tight shooting schedule. Therefore, Tim Burton opted to shoot his actors, who largely interact with an almost totally digital world for the vast majority of the movie, green-screen with Genesis cameras, and then turn the stereoscopic conversion process over to Imageworks. As a consequence, the only way for him to see his characters in their eventual environment was to get a virtual look using a system similar to what was used on “Avatar.”

“On ‘Avatar,’ we also had developed a system we called ‘Simul-Cam’ that applied more to live-action sets in New Zealand,” Stromberg explains. “If we had a live-action set, and then a partial live-action set, and a green screen component, in that green screen area, we could do a real-time dimensional composite by tracking the camera—tracking a virtual environment to a real environment. That was useful for camera work, because Jim and his actors could see what would be there, and the actors could see what would be there.

“So that gave us an idea going into ‘Alice,’ ” he adds. “I knew we would primarily have partial sets and a lot of greenscreen. It seemed to me, this would be the best way to show Tim Burton (during shooting) what would fill those large green screens. So, I essentially took all I learned from ‘Avatar’ and applied it to ‘Alice,’ and once again, I had a virtual art department going for this purpose. We built digital representations of all the sets. The only difference was, in ‘Alice,’ we had real actors interacting with sets, so we also built partial (physical) sets, and for every set, we therefore had the ability for actors to touch things and feel things going through doorways and so on. Then, we had the green sets that were going to be replaced by digital sets. So it was a weird hybrid of some of the things we did on ‘Avatar’ combined with some even newer things.

“The point was, I approached ‘Alice’ from a design perspective with the idea of getting Tim Burton as much as possible to view on the stage during filming, to help him know where the actors were in this world we had designed at all times. (Virtual sets) were not all we used—we also had some physical and digital artwork from very talented artists, and some traditional models and miniatures for Tim to walk over and examine. But the virtual sets were a major part of it, and between the virtual and the physical, Tim had three different ways to view what would be in the shot later.”

At the end of the day, laboring as production designer on two state-of-the-art digital productions back-to-back in recent years has made Stromberg something of an expert on the issue of designing digital imagery to be seen on the big screen in stereoscopic glory. In closing out our discussion, he offered up some advice on the issue of designing for stereo, and what the 3D paradigm shift might mean for designers. Click below to hear that advice.

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