Green Screen Work and Miniatures

There were over 5o green screens built at the Sony Studios.

However, Tim Burton didn't like green screen and wanted to use blue screen because he thought it would be "less problematic, pshchologically, but Alice was wearing blue so we had to let that go ." Working with the green screen environment was an exhausting time for the cast and crew. Tim Burton resorted to wearing special glasses that had violet lenses to help ease the intensitity of the green screen. The actors also suffered from headaches due to the chroma green coloring.

To help merge the world of green screen to the virtual environment, realtime playback of the 3D models were generated. "We created MotionBuilder environments and composited those on set using live playback from the camera. If Tim wanted it, he could see rough versions of the digital environments while we shot the live actors moving through them." said Ralston

To help navigate through the 3D environments, several tracking systems were used by filmmakers and director of photography Dariusz Wolski to connect with his Panavision Genesis digital camera system. The system was programed with the functions of panning, tilting and focal length allowing, Burton to have complete control of the camera with the CG environment be tracked similtaneously as if it were a real set.

The use of miniature models helped also with shooting shots such as Alice shrinking and growing in the room to help give a more convincing preformance. They also aided Burton in planning camera angles.

Since there was such a tight schedule, turn around time for shots of Mia Wasikowska, who plays Alice, interacting with different scaled performers were difficult. An on set compositing tool was used to help scale the performers to proper size need for the scene. Wanting to keep a cretain energy to the performance, actors were placed with each other on the green set instead of traditionally replacing them with tennis balls. For example when "Alice is eight and half feet tall holding the normal-size Hatter's face, talking to him one on one...Burton filmed Wasikowska on a paltform to elevate her eye-line and approximate the correct height."