ALITA

ALITA

"This movie is the story of Alita's journey toward a better understanding of her own identity," James Cameron says. "l like Alita because she's absolutely fearless. When she's confronted with an injustice, she will do something. Her vulnerability is about the people she loves — she will never fear for herself, [only] for them." "We see the world through Alita's eyes," producer Jon Landau explains. "She comes into it not expecting anything. She's just taking everything in. That's what we want the audience to do."
	Alita goes through several transitions, both psychological and physical. Her cyber core is found in the Iron City Scrapyard by Dr. Dyson Ido, who puts it into the beautifully hand-crafted cyborg body he had previously built for his now-deceased daughter. After Alita's Cybergirl form, or ''doll body," is devastated in a fight, Ido transfers her core into an URM (United Republic of Mars) Berserker body, the most advanced cyborg weapon ever created, which adapts its form to her.
	While all versions of Alita were portrayed in performance capture by Rosa Salazar, onscreen, Alita is completely CGI, though she looks photo-realistic and interacts with live actors around her. So Battle. Angel required extremely close collaboration between the visual effects designers at Lightstorm in Southern California and 3D animators at Weta Digital in New Zealand. It's all about if you can make the audience believe that character's real in a tight close-up," observes Cameron. "Rosa Salazar is our greatest asset on this movie. Its hard to quantify how big the reaction was [during the audition] that Robert [Rodriguez] and I both had to Rosa's performance."
	Alita's Weta senior visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri explains that his team is combining imagery inspired by the original manga, artwork developed from 2005 on for the project, and Salazar's performance, which what we ground the character in. Alita has a heart-shaped face with a small mouth and very large eyes. So we started working out animation studies with Rosa's features and put them into those shapes. [Alita's] mouth still resembles Rosa's, her eyes still resemble Rosa's, but we had to make a lot of changes to accommodate the fact that, for example, Alita's mouth is so small. It means her jaw is a little bit smaller. Similarly. the big eyes have to fit into enlarged sockets. But if you build the underlying eve sockets and everything that supports the eye, and get all the detail right, then our mind will take it in believably."
	Letteri continues. "We have to build Alita's three-dimensional model in the computer. Its like a moving sculpture. We have a skull inside of this model for the articulation." When Alita changes bodies, "We have to change the shape of the skull slightly. Her face changes to reflect the older character that she becomes: the shape is a little more oval, the nose gets a little stronger, the cheekbones become a little more pronounced. The skull changes to reflect what you're seeing on the face outside."
	Character designer Joe Pepe says his initial job on Battle Angel was to help generate different variants of Alita's eye, mouth and nose sizes. Though he can't confirm exactly how much larger Alita's eyes are compared to normal human eyes at the time of writing, experiments went from twelve to forty-five percent larger, with her nose and mouth reduced by as much as twelve-and-a-half percent smaller than human, "just to see if it worked or not. Jim always says, Take it to the point of breaking it.'
	"On the first image." Pepe continues. "everybody had their ideal version of what they wanted." This started with input from director Rodriguez. then went to Cameron. "I did versions based on the two of them speaking to one another. "Pepe then gathered input from visual consultants Ben Procter and Dylan Cole, and had his own ideas as well. Rodriguez also sent some of his favorite images from the manga. "Robert was doing a little Photoshop." Pepe recalls. "He would take my artwork and liquefy and draw on it, and send it back. Even if I had followed the initial notes, sometimes it a little different than you had expected, so he got hands-on with that.
	Visual effects supervisor Richard E. Hollander was tasked with making sure that the agreed-upon art concepts look three-dimensional and move accordingly. "I would say the mouth is the hardest thing to do, followed by the eyes. The proportions of Alita's head are slightly altered. Getting that sculpturally to look good involved quite a bit of trial and error. Even after you build these characters, you have to keep adjusting them."
	Weta visual effects supervisor Eric Saindon reveals that the initial artwork of Alita's cyber core was done by Procter. "We built our model based on that, and then we added roughening and patina to make her feel like she fit into the Scrapyard where Ido finds her body, [where] all the metal is similarly distressed. We've given her the same effect. Her core was scuffed and worn down, so that it looks like she could have been there for a long time."
	Procter in turn credits "genius 3D designer Vitaly Bulgarov" with doing a lot of concept art on Alita's original form, which was "heavily influenced by the original manga. There were one or two images in particular that really guided it. In 2005, [concept artist] James Clyne did a black and white illustration of Alita in a casual ball position. We owe a debt to a lot of work those [original concept artists] did."
	For the texture of Alita's doll body, Procter says that Rodriguez provided a screengrab of alabaster vase from the 1987 movie Angel Heart. "We were looking at that, combined with this decorative etching [on the body], combined with slightly steampunky brass details for how the joints worked." The computer combined precise percentages of photo-reference material to achieve the final texture, but Procter cautions, "I don't want to give too much credit to the computer, because its people hand-making texture maps, and choosing what photographic sources to use. What we went for material-wise is something that's probably a resin, a plastic, but it reads both as slightly porcelain and slightly alabaster. So it's got more specular breakup, which is the way that highlights look on something, little pings of light."
	In contrast, the Berserker body costume is dark, but "It's very reflective," Saindon notes. "There are parts of it that are metal, and other parts that are almost translucent silicone, which gives her a whole other level of depth. You see into her muscles a little, you get different levels of skin, because as you see into her muscle, you also see the bones within her muscle."
	For Alita's height, Saindon explains, "Cybergirl is around five-foot-one, Rosa is closer to five-foot-two, and Berserker is almost five-foot-four. So, because Rosa fits right in between, we can take her motion and get the motion for both Alitas. When Rosa was Cybergirl, her movements were a little bit more innocent. When she was Berserker, she became much more confident and strong. We don't have to do a lot to those performances. We create [each form in the computer] and then we put a skeleton in it, and that skeleton is driven by Rosa's performance, so that as Rosa moves our 3D geometry moves around with it."
	Longtime Rodriguez costume designer Nina Proctor was in charge of the physical, practical costumes created at Troublemaker Studios. She describes Alita's Cybergirl wardrobe as that of "a soft, cool fourteen-year-old. She's wearing pants and T-shirts. [Salazar's] photo double was dressed in her clothes, and she would do a little bit of the action, so we could see how the clothes moved. Then Weta Digital photographed everything — front, back, sides. Anything that we custom-built, we made them sets of patterns, so when they're painting it in, they're able to follow our patterns.
	"I went with softer colors, thin jackets — we're at the equator, so it can't be anything real heavy. As Alita progresses, we get her into boots rather than high-top tennis shoes and as she gets to know this group of kids, we make her a little bit more stylish; fitted cargo pants, shorter T-shirts. We were careful about her necklines — some of those choices were to help with the CGI process, because the costume was so close to the face. Any material with a softer, less defined edge would make the CGI process more complicated.
	When Alita enters the rough Kansas Bar, Proctor says, "We make her look tougher there through the kind of boot that she has on. They are a little bit taller than ankle boots, lace-ups, but then they have several straps of leather that wrap around the boot."
	For Alitas Berserker body, Proctor says, "I custom made a black leather bodysuit that was really fitted, and then all of these pieces for her arms will be painted in over that.
	The scene where Alita literally offers Hugo her heart, removing the organ from her chest, called for special planning, Proctor recalls. "I wanted to emphasize that our young Alita [is] now an eighteen-year-old, with a cute top that is a little bit fitted and cap sleeves that really show off her new arms. And with a zipper front, so that when we get to the part where she tells Hugo. 'Here, you can have my heart,' she simply has to unzip a little bit, and she can pull her heart out. She's not trying to pull a T-shirt over her head, or messing with buttons."
	"Weta did a full-scale 3D printout of Alita," Saindon recalls, "and we gave that to [digital costume consultant] Deborah Scott. Deb did her actual costumes on that printout. She built them to the scale she wanted out of the material she wanted, and then we found a thirteen-year-old girl with the exact same proportions and the exact same height as the 3D printout. We put those costumes on her, and we were able to walk her around and film her, so that we could see the movement of the cloth, how it draped, the way it moved when she did different motions. Then we took Deb's sewing patterns and built those same patterns in 3S space, [using] a technology called Marvelous Designer."
	Scott worked on Alita's wardrobe at Lightstorm and describes her work on Battle Angel as "Refining things, so that the digital world could in some ways enhance the costumes that were laid out for Alita, because while they're shooting, Salazar's almost always wearing a performance-capture suit, so you never really get to see her in her wardrobe. Our approach enabled us to solve a lot of technical problems, as well as make either color changes or variations on the original costume.
	"For instance," Scott elaborates, "as they start developing the body design digitally, they may consequently want to go back and redesign some of the costumes, In a scene where they decide to show that Alita has some mechanical bits around her collar, it could be that the original costume was designed as a T-shirt that covered that area. So how can you show some of that? Would you make it an off-the-shoulder top? Would you create lower neckline? That's a lot or it, just tweaks trying to honor the original intent of the costume design and yet solving some of the problems for digital."
	Those digital challenges, director Robert Rodriguez enthuses, are a big part of why he wanted to bring the Alita character to life. When he viewed Cameron's 2005 Battle Angel artwork of Alita, Rodriguez says, "I saw that he was going for a true anime character that we've never seen live-action photo-real. That was really what inspired me to take it on, because I thought, Wow, that's something that I hadn't seen, and we could write the book on what that looks like.' Rosa was so expressive, you were picturing how amazing the animated version would look of what she was doing."