The original John Leech illustrations from Dickens' A Christmas Carol serve as guide for both the art department and post-production department.

BD: What kinds of tools are you using?

DC: That's a dangerous territory. I can't get into specifics, but it relates to things that make modeling and rigging easier: how to automate more so that the whole process is more fluid.

BD: And to do it all without compromise with the full support of Disney?

DC: Yes, fundamentally, we're making full 3-D films, in which stereoscopic is part of the process from day one, so all of our characters and all of our environments are built with that combination in mind. And it really dictates how Bob puts together the film because he's always thinking in 3-D. One of the things that we're trying to build into the pipeline and workflow is the idea that everything is fluid: characters are fluid and environments are fluid. Bob's a very dynamic filmmaker so that as he goes through the process of putting the film together, he likes to push and pull walls and change sets, scaling them dynamically within a set or changing character features, so it's all to get the perfect shot. And that gives us the guide in terms of how we build our tools. Mainly, the big difference is that we know from the start how Bob likes to make his films, and we build the tools to accommodate that. Bottom line: it means fluidity, it means trying to make everything so that nothing is ever locked. We have designs that are locked, but everything slightly changes and it's completely transparent to the audience. But for the filmmaker it's a great tool because he can actually compose the camera exactly how he wants it.

BD: What is the scope of A Christmas Carol compared to Polar Express and Beowulf?

DC: The scope is quite huge: A Christmas Carol is going to be one of the most challenging shows I've ever worked on. And I have to say that's one of the reasons I really like working with Bob. On every film he likes to push the boundaries of both design and storytelling. And so my impressions of the films before and after are vastly different. We're still refining the art form on A Christmas Carol in terms of defining what the performance capture will be. And one of the beauties is that we're discovering what this form is and we're all part of a learning process. And Christmas Carol, I think, will be one of the first films to really define what the art form is. Even from there, the films after A Christmas Carol will define it in other ways as well. So the wonderful thing is that we don't quite know where we'll end up but the process is amazing.

BD: Are you using the original John Leech illustrations from the Dickens novella as a guide?

DC: Yes, the illustrations are definitely the guide and the nice thing about having the art department part integrated with the post-production part is that a lot of the workflow from art goes into post as well. Some of the post-production artists actually come to the art department and start designing as well. So, again, it creates a fluid studio where everything works. One of the great things about actually designing a studio from scratch in the case of Hamilton is that we've constructed everything so that it spirals around each other. And it was a real good experiment in that the temporary space we were in worked out great as a model to really see the best way to layout departments. Who should be next to who? And we had to work out a lot of bugs, so Hamilton will be a good test case.

BD: What can you discuss about the look of A Christmas Carol?

DC: It's going to be a hyper real, textural look. We're defining it as phototextural. We're not recreating live action. There's no point to that. What we're doing is trying to define a style where you're taking live-action performance characters and caricaturizing them: finding the best features of what an actor brings to a character and really pulling those things out. In some ways, it's a 3-D version of what line character artists do.

BD: How does it fit stylistically in relation to the other films?

DC: It's going to be a little bit more advanced than Monster House. On Monster House we perhaps went with one range. Christmas Carol will be defined as the other range, closer to Beowulf. And so this is where I get back to the idea that we're still learning what performance capture can do for us. In this case, we know that with Jim Carrey as the main actor, he's so malleable. We're actually taking a lot of the cues from what he does as an actor and exaggerating those features. I think that's where the strength of performance capture is: we can create the perfect embodiment of what Jim Carrey's actions should be.

BD: He's arguably the most expressive actor you've had to work with thus far.

DC: By far. In one of our early surveys of trying to define what Jim's facial range is, we were amazed at how elastic he is. And there are some things that he can do with his face when recreated 1:1would be unreal. It's one of those things where you have to pick and choose what's appropriate for the character. And that's worked for the character of Scrooge: he really got into it in terms of knowing what facial expressions and what part of his anatomy that he wanted to exaggerate. And those are the things that we then design into the character.