The Polar Express animation supervisor David Schaub.

This is the final installment in VFXWorld’s The Polar Express production diary. Read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

From the very beginning, it was clear that certain portions of The Polar Express would have to be keyframe-animated. We had wolves, an eagle, caribou and reindeer that obviously couldn’t be directed in MoCap. There was also a fantastical sequence where we follow the ticket as it flies out the window of the train, which also didn’t qualify for motion capture. The nature of the Smokey and Steamer characters were by design more exaggerated and cartoony than real people, and thus required the kind of freedom and control that keyframe animation affords.

As the animation supervisor on this project, it was a great opportunity to create characters and performances in much the same way we’ve done in the past.

The Ticket Ride Sequence
The real motivation for the ticket ride was the illustration in the book where we see an image of three wolves looking at the train. (Every illustration in the book is represented somewhere in the film.) We needed some reason to establish that shot, and Bob Zemeckis thought, let’s do the ticket ride, where Chris loses the ticket and it floats around and lands in the forest and these wolves come along and strike the same pose as the book.

Bob Zemeckis imagined the ticket ride sequence as a crazy journey and he gave the animators and digital artists carte blanche to go off and explore. All images © 2004 by Warner Bros. Ent. Inc.

Bob’s imagination went from there, and he wanted to turn it into a grand bit, where the ticket goes on a crazy journey — his inspiration just spilled out. From the outset, Bob turned to us and told us to start playing, to start executing stuff. He really gave us carte blanche to go off and explore, with the idea of pitching new ideas as we went. It was an exciting exploratory process.

We were given some rough drawings and story ideas that his storyboard people had mocked up, and we took those drawings and set it up as a real shot. The unique thing about the ticket ride is that it is all one shot — no cuts from beginning to end. In the original cut it was five minutes long — we ended up with 2.5 minutes.

Stephane Couture was the first animator to start work on the sequence, creating wolf cycles. I also started animating early on with the wolf performances as they run into frame and strike the pose from the book. We did some tests and pitched some ideas to Bob about how the ticket would move. He wanted the ticket to move naturalistically, so once we got that feedback, we rigged the ticket to support that idea.