Alita: Battle Angel

In September 2017 I packed my bags for New Zealand and an assignment at Wētā Digital, now Wētā FX, that would keep me there until the end of March 2018. If you know me, you know what that meant: I had dreamed of working at this studio since I was a teenager, and their films are what sparked my passion for visual effects in the first place.

Alita: Battle Angel was the second project of my stay, right after Rampage: the adaptation of the manga Gunnm, directed by Robert Rodriguez, produced by James Cameron and Jon Landau, and released in February 2019.

An amnesiac cyborg and a floating city

The film follows Alita, an amnesiac cyborg trying to understand where she comes from, against the backdrop of Zalem, a floating city reserved for the elite, with the Earth below serving as its scrapyard.

Wētā brought Alita to the screen entirely in CG, and their mandate went much further: the studio created most of the characters you see in the film. My shots, though, were almost all about her.

Respecting the performance

My work was pure motion editing, as on Rampage before it. Most of my shots involved Alita herself, along with a few secondary characters and some background cyborgs. I worked in Nuance, Wētā’s in-house editing software, and it took a full month of tutorials before I was up and running on it.

The job itself demands a very particular kind of precision: Alita had to stick to Rosa Salazar’s performance almost frame by frame, over the live action plate playing in the background, so that the CG character covered the actress as completely as possible. Wherever she still showed through, the paint artists then painted her out, frame by frame.

The performance had to be respected down to the last detail, especially with James Cameron producing.

A teenage dream

Working at Wētā was a childhood dream come true. And there I was, sitting next to people who had worked on the films I adore, The Lord of the Rings, Planet of the Apes, Avatar, listening to their wildest stories from those productions. It was unreal.

Alita pushed my limits in realistic animation further than any project before it, both in observing movement and in working the animation itself. The rigour I learned there, and the care given to every step, are things I will carry with me.