KR: Carey Villegas [one of the visual effects supervisors] and I were working on expanding the Mad Hatter's eyes, so we picked some shots from Ed Wood and did those and sent them over to Tim, and I happened to be there the day that Johnny [Depp] was visiting in England. They came in and cracked up and loved it, so that sold it right then and there. We enlarged his eyes and had to match the man and constantly keep them tracking to Johnny's real eyes. And it got harder whenever he got into a perspective change: we'd have to warp stuff and make it blend in better. But that was the technique.

BD: And did you use the Arnold renderer?

KR: Yes, we did. As terrifying as that was at the start, we created a lot of breakthroughs with that and I'm very happy with [the results]. As difficult as some of the issues were with rendering times and image quality because of the immense size of some of the shots we did, I love lighting with it. I really enjoyed it much more than anything else I used. It's much more intuitive in a weird way. And right out of the box, you could get something that looked a little bit more organic, which was key to this film. 

It's more naturalistic than what I'm used to. It's like when I'm shooting miniatures and the stuff I've done in the past, you can tell. There's such a nice softness to some of the light, if that's what you want, and it has a nice quality to how the ambient light bounces back into the image. At least you're off on the right foot instead of beating your head on some of these things, trying to do something that vaguely looks organic and natural.

BD: The execution scene is pretty complicated. How did that come together?

KR: Well, it's sort of what the whole movie looked like at one point. We shot our principals: Helena, Johnny, Crispin [Glover]. And green everywhere, and no extras. All we had were a couple of stand-in people in green to let you know where they would be. We had voice talent in green up on the podium basically they're up on the balcony with the Red Queen. They're the group that's always following her around, but we hadn't quite figured out who they were or what they looked like yet. Our voice talent did the dialogue, and, of course, we're doing the CG environment that's surrounding everybody, as we're trying to find ways to blend stuff in a nice way. The CG animals were all going to be animated in here. Late in the game, Tim came up with the idea that we needed to sprinkle in more of our animals in here because they're really the ones who've been enslaved and they really want to come forward when the Red Queen's getting hers. It added a lot to the moment.