The Delivery montage was shot entirely on bluescreen with no background plates. Rainmaker UK's Adam Gascoyne was given creative carte blanche to create a montage of background, to suggest that Fred was traveling all around the world. 

The Delivery montage was shot entirely on bluescreen and no background plates were shot. "We were given creative carte blanche to create a montage of background for the sequence, which suggested that Fred was traveling all around the world," Gascoyne explains. "We spent two weeks acquiring a library of stills and moving footage and stitching it all together, adding steam, snow elements and Christmas lights as we went. It turned out to be quite a task to add Christmas decorations and a winter look to the backgrounds as the stills had been shot in August... For the Paris sequence, we built a very detailed model of the Eiffel Tower, which required a massive effort amount of hand modeling. We also built a basic model of Paris in LightWave, referencing aerial photos from Google Earth. This allowed us to get the correct scale for the area. We then went to Paris and shot thousands of high-resolution photographs to use both as projections and reference. These included 360-degree panoramas of the city taken every half-hour from the tower, which gave us flexibility with sky textures and light conditions."

Fighting Suspension of Disbelief
It only takes one night for Santa to deliver his presents to children all over the world, but it took more than a year-and-a-half for Bicknell and his team to visualize it. "Christmas movies that feature Santa, elves, flying reindeers, etc., are difficult beasts as they are fantastical to start with, and therefore, the audience's suspension of disbelief is challenged from the get go. However, I feel that David and Allan Cameron created a world that was so warm and cheerful that we had the template to extend it beyond the cast and sound stages. I feel that all the visual effects worked in tandem with the look and experience of the movie, and really helped make it one of the biggest live-action Christmas movies every made."

Alain Bielik is the founder and editor of renowned effects magazine S.F.X, published in France since 1991. He also contributes to various French publications, both print and online, and occasionally to Cinefex. In 2004, he organized a major special effects exhibition at the Musee International de la Miniature in Lyon, France.