VANCOUVER — Zoic Studios (www.zoicstudios.com) completed work on 155 visual effects shots for Tim Burton’s latest live action feature, Big Eyes. VFX supervisors Mark Stetson and Ralph Maiers led a team of Zoic artists to revisit the effervescence of a pop art sensation in the wake of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Big Eyes stars Amy Adams, Christoph Waltz and Jason Schwartzman, and offers a loving look at artist Margaret Keane, whose husband Walter Keane created a cultural phenomenon in the 1960s with a mass market approach to selling her paintings of stylized, big-eyed waifs. The studio’s Vancouver and Los Angeles locations both contributed to the feature, which was shot using Arri’s Alexa primarily in and around Vancouver and on stages, with additional short shoots in San Francisco and Hawaii.
Stetson previously worked with Burton and production designer Rick Henrichs on miniature effects. Matte artist Syd Dutton led the environments team and also brought a first-person vision of growing up in San Francisco in the 1950s and 1960s. He artfully blended details from various historic locations to convey the romance of the period to a modern audience while maintaining Burton’s carefully composed and signature visual style.
Burton also asked the Zoic team to handle concept work for Margaret’s hallucinatory vision of people around her with big eyes, like her paintings. Using visual effects producer Lauren Weidel as a model, Maiers and Kenton Rannie developed a series of looks to explore how far they could distort a human face to the proportion of a big-eyed waif, without breaking the barrier of disbelief. This work also guided the shot of Margaret seeing her own reflection with eyes evocative of her paintings.
Following principal photography, the Zoic team worked closely with editor JC Bond to execute Burton’s vision for the visual effects work. Zoic’s high-speed pipeline and integrated facility tools allowed Dutton and Stetson in Los Angeles to collaborate closely with Maiers and the team in Vancouver to transform the approved concepts into finalized shots. As the cut took shape, Zoic also worked on an added sequence for the opening titles that would portray Margaret and Jane’s journey across California’s central coast. Contending with rampant drought conditions, the Zoic team revitalized these shots to deliver the beauty of the land that would set the tone for the beginning of the film.
Late in post production, Zoic was tasked with six additional matte shots, including two establishing shots of Hawaii; a fabricated, stylized shot of the 1964 New York Times entrance in Manhattan; a shot of a fictitious French restaurant on San Francisco’s Powell Street; an establishing shot of Chinatown; and an establishing shot of a San Francisco nightclub.
“These shots were the biggest and most challenging in the film for us,” recalls Stetson. “They were also the most satisfying, because Tim gave us a lot of responsibility for their design and execution. We packed a lot of production value into these shots.”
Throughout post production, the Vancouver team took advantage of their proximity to many of the shoot locations, returning to take additional reference measurements and photographs to ensure the final shots had all the right detail. The Zoic team completed the VFX work to ACES specifications with the Open EXR format. This allowed for flexibility with files integrated from Arri, Red, Nikon and Canon cameras.