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Alice In Wonderland SFX Legend Talks
Mania Interview: Ken Ralston By
Rob Vaux
March 01, 2010
© Mania/Bob Trate
The list of movies which visual effects artist Ken Ralston has worked on read like a role of honor. His early days at ILM were marked the original Star Wars trilogy, Star Trek II, III, and IV, and Back to the Future.That latter film began a fruitful collaboration with Robert Zemeckis, which encompassed the second and third Back to the Future films, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Forrest Gump, The Polar Express, and Beowulf. Along the way, Ralston collected a fistful of Oscars and cemented his status as one of Hollywood's premiere effects artists. Alice in Wonderland represents his first work with Tim Burton. In an exclusive interview with Mania.com, he spoke about his efforts on the new film and the ever-changing landscape of visual effects.
Question: How did you tackle the challenge of scale in this film? Alice grows and shrinks throughout the piece; it must have presented its share of obstacles.
Ken Ralston: There's a lot of different tricks we had to use to do the scale, and the requirements of each scene are different. Tim [Burton] said, "The first time all this happens should be the big stuff. The rest of the time, no one cares." So the first time Alice drinks the potion and shrinks, we had to find the coolest angle to do that. We had her shrink inside her dress; we based the idea on one of [costume designer] Colleen Atwood's images, with this dress sort of ballooning around her. We decided the best way to do it was to have Mia wear a green-screen leotard basically and build the dress in the computer around her. It gave that first moment a bizarre, kind of otherworldly feeling you might not expect.
Q: How about getting the actors' faces onto the CGI characters in a way that made them work?
KR: Both Tim and I agreed that we needed as much of the real actors as possible. We don't want representations of actors when we have the actors themselves. That took us down a particular road for a number of characters: the Red Queen, Stayne and the Tweedles for starters. Are you going to hire Matt Lucas and not see those eyes when you're looking at a close-up of that head? No! You can't ever get there with computers. You can't do it. Why lose 40 percent of his performance just for a CG head?
Q: How familiar were you with Alice before you started? What was your history with the story?
KR: It still have brain scars from watching the 1930s Alice as a kid. In fact, when I first met Tim, we both were talking about it, because it made quite an impression. I saw it on TV as a kid, and I had nightmares about it for weeks. W.C. Fields was Humpty Dumpty. Gary Cooper was the White Knight. We talked about how unsettling that movie is. It's not a great film, but the make-up is ingenious and very true to the perennial stuff. I've never forgotten it and we talked about it during the design stage. I had my team look at it and start building our ideas.
We also looked at the book, of course, and some of the early illustrations which accompanied it. We actually did some early work at a house Tim had bought in England. It was Arthur Rackham's house. [Rackham was one of the illustrators of Alice in Wonderland at the turn of the century.] That was pretty sweet. A great ambience to the place that helped us out.
Q: The typical knock on effects is that they lose the humanity in favor of the bells and whistles. Do you find that to be true? Is it something you have to fight against?
KR: It depends on the movie. What's the script like? What's the director like? You could have perfect effects and it would still be dull and impersonal. We started off… I think Disney at one point thought it was going to be an all motion-capture movie, which is probably why they contacted me first, because of Polar Express and Beowulf. Then Tim and I met, and we both went, "that just doesn't make sense," especially with the cast we had.
Q: Does it become harder to maintain that humanity in the effects as time goes on?
KR: It's hard. It's very hard. I'd probably do some stuff differently now, knowing what I know. The blends on some of that stuff are pretty complicated, especially with the Tweedles. There's a lot of weird technical things that go on, but some of the Tweedle shots were really brutal.
Q: Does it help to apply a specific technique to a tough shot, or is it more about finding the technique that works for the shot?
KR: I never go into a movie with a technique that we'll wrap something around. That never works. You get an idea for the kind of character you want with character design, and you start to get a feel for what he looks like. And then the environment he's in, and your time frame and your budget, and you start to figure out what works. This is one of the reasons why I love working with Tim. It's always about the story; it's never about the machines running behind the curtain. As hard as it is and as tough as some of these techniques can be, who cares? You figure out the story, you figure out what’s going on with Alice. Then you say, "okay she's two feet tall; how do we make that work?"
Q: How did you work with Tim in getting all that together?
KR: We actually found a couple of geniuses out there to help. Michael Kutsche had some stuff on CG Portfolio. So we said, "Let's give him a test piece." It was the caterpillar, though we didn't say it was for Alice. He sent this thing in and we said, "We have to get this guy." Bobby Chiu was another one. I found it really exciting, just pulling these guys off of websites. They'd never done anything like this before. Tim did his sketches, of course, and it was kind of a back and forth. The best thing for Tim was to print out the other guy's sketches, and let him refine them. Then Michael would take them back and make some changes and it would go through that until we had the images we wanted.
Q: How do you keep on top of the rapidly advancing technology in the special effects realm?
KR: I work with really smart people. [Laughs.] I have a certain amount of experience in stage smarts and shooting things that I can use later. But the guys who are really into the super-detailed aspects of this--the Carey Villegases of the world--they're the geniuses. I'm really happy I had such strong team around me; they're great.
Q: Is 3-D the future of movies?
KR: It's a future. Personally for me, 3-D or not 3-D, it's not a big deal. This film actually really benefited from 3-D as far as I'm concerned. To put Alice in that environment, it adds one more tool to help me convince you that she's really there. It's a great tool for that.
Q: There are a lot of groundbreaking films on your resume. Are there any ones that stood out while you were working on them, ones where you thought, "boy we're really re-writing the rules here?"
KR: I'd feel that way about a lot of movies, though ironically not Star Wars. That was just a "we gotta get through this" kind of experience. But I think Gump really felt that way. Death Becomes Her too. Most of Bob [Zemeckis's] movies are always trying to do that. Not on purpose; they just did it. This film is probably as big as all of his as far as pushing envelopes goes… something that Tim just has no interest in. It's all about the movie for him, and I really appreciate that.
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Interesting interview. Ken Ralston mentions his strong team and that he really was lucky to have such a great team. It shows how important the people that you are working with on the final results.