By Bryant Frazer
February 25, 2010 Source: Film & Video
Working in the editorial department on Alice in Wonderland, JC Bond was the point of first contact for principal photography, assembling scenes as quickly as director Tim Burton could shoot them. He was also the gatekeeper for the film's extensive visual-effects content, which he received and analyzed before it was cut into the movie. Working on a team led by film editor Chris Lebenzon, ACE, Bond made sure thousands of pieces of content fell into place as expected in the editorial pipeline — in stereo 3D, no less. Film & Video asked him about the challenge of managing massive quantities of footage, and found out why Alice might look ever so slightly different depending on where you see it.FILM & VIDEO: You’re credited as an “additional editor” on Alice in Wonderland. What were your responsibilities?
JC Bond: On a project this long, my responsibilities changed during the project. During the shooting phase, my initial responsibility was to assemble the scenes as they were being shot. One of the advantages we had on this project was that the movie was shot digitally for the most part. The bookends, which take place in “the real world,” were shot on film. The stuff in Underland, or Wonderland, was all shot digitally. We were connected directly to the shooting stage through servers, and we were working about 20 minutes behind camera. Right after they wrapped a particular set-up, we would load it into our [Avid] Media Composers and start cutting. My main responsibility during that phase was to assemble the dailies as they came in and have a version of the scene for Tim Burton to look at.
So you were making a rough assembly.
Sometimes that became the assembly. It depends on what happens. Some scenes got worked quite a bit more afterward, and for other scenes, what we got on day one was it.
How did your job change during post-production?
During post, my main responsibility was to receive the VFX shots from our facilities, analyze them, see if the artists were doing what we asked them to do, and cut them into the movie and have them ready to present to Tim Burton. That’s basically the breakdown between our two phases. On a project this long – for me, the job was 17 months, but the shooting was only two and a half months. The rest was all post-production.
So it was an extended process.
In reality, on a project of this size, that was short. We would have liked another year. We would have settled for another six months. We got neither.
How did shooting the film in 3D affect your work?
The reality is that our movie is not shot in stereo 3D. It was shot in 2D and then converted during the VFX process. The majority of our movie happens in Wonderland. In Wonderland, we used computer-generated backgrounds and computer-generated environments so all we were shooting was elements. Our entire main shoot was a gigantic green-screen shoot. The stereo process happened in post-production. We converted every single shot. Because the environment was computer-generated, it was created in 3D, and the elements that were [shot in] 2D were post-converted. We did have to manage stereo media from the moment we started getting VFX back from the facilities, and that was a little over a year of handling. But not during the actual shoot.
Editing for 3D on Alice in Wonderland
