Zoic Studios 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 finalised shots.
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.
Watch the
Big Eyes trailer.
