Furious FX delivered almost 180 shots: its work included altering the Disney logo and creating the Great Hall of Snow Globes (above). All images © Disney Enterprises Inc. All rights reserved.

In the first movie, Scott Calvin (Tim Allen) became Santa Claus. In the second, he found a new wife. In the third opus, The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause, opening from Walt Disney Pictures on Nov. 3, he must foil Jack Frost’s (Martin Short) crafty scheme to take over Christmas. Directed by Michael Lembeck, The Escape Clause, turned out to be a greater technical challenge than the first two movies, as more than 90% of the action took place at the North Pole. It meant that the elf world had to be significantly extended, with many new magical locations being introduced to the audience. A large part of this universe was created via elaborate sets designed by Richard J. Holland, but its real magic was crafted by digital artists at Furious FX and Tippett Studio, the two facilities selected by vfx producer David Yrisarri.

Having just delivered 115 shots for Sky High for Yrisarri, Furious FX was a logical candidate to handle the bulk of the work on The Santa Clause 3. The team included vfx producers Tracy Takahashi and Tiffany A. Smith, CG supervisor Mark Shoaf and creative director Kevin Lingenfelser. “We delivered just under 180 shots, which accounted for our largest project total to date and our most complex CG effects so far,” notes co-founder and exec producer Scott Dougherty. “We also had the notable distinction of being the first vfx house to alter the brand new Walt Disney Pictures CG logo (introduced with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest) via an added opening segment where the logo is revealed in a snow globe, then picked up and shaken by Santa.”

Altering a Landmark Logo
It was Lembeck’s idea to extend the camera pull back on the Disney logo to reveal the snow globe in which it is supposedly encased, and then introduce Santa Claus, creating a smooth transition with the opening shot. “They wanted to get the audience into the movie right away,” Co-founder and exec vfx supervisor David Lingenfelser explains. “The only problem was that we got this assignment about three weeks before our deadline… And since we were altering the company’s logo, the approval process was more complex than it typically is. After heavy previsualization, we shot a locked off plate of Santa holding a base without any snow globe mounted onto it. Then, we tracked a CG snow globe to that base and projected that onto our CG camera move, so that the plate would move at the exact same rate as everything else in the shot. We used the 2K file of the Disney logo and tracked it to the snow globe, adding CG snow and a through-glass effect. All this was modeled, animated and rendered in Maya, before being composited in Shake, our main pipeline for this project.”

Although 80% of the CG elements created for the movie were rendered in Maya, there were some specific shots for which the team felt that RenderMan or mental ray were more appropriate. “Basically, whenever we had heavy effects particles that required motion blur, we used mental ray,” Lingenfelser notes. “That was the case for the magical gold dust that appears many times in the movie. And when we needed a lot of motion blur on a heavy CG object, like the toy mobile or the gift bag, we employed RenderMan.”

Furious FX shot the magical Great Hall of Snow Globes plate with two actors and the frame of the room. Floor-to-ceiling windows, CG frost, floating snow globes, snowfall, interactive light, highlights and glints on the globes were added.

Revealing the Great Hall of Snow Globes
Snow globes also played a key role in the Snow Globes Room sequence, an extremely important effect for the director. Lembeck wanted it to be the most magical scene of the entire movie. In this sequence, the Hall of Snow Globes is revealed in all its glory. Surrounded by huge carved ice windows with changing colors, about 60 snow globes float magically in the room, each encasing an image linked to a previous Santa. “When we shot the plate, all that existed were the two actors and the frame of the room,” Lingenfelser says. “We added all the floor-to-ceiling windows, with CG frost animated to softly form and dissipate, the floating snow globes and their content, the snow falling down in the room, plus the artificial snow inside each globe, and all the interactive light on the environment. As a final step to give it a little bit more of a magical feeling, we added many highlights and glints on the globes that turned on and off.”

All the elements for this sequence were created in Maya. Once the team had the live-action plate, CG artists started by layering in the background windows. “We ran a lot of single frame tests playing with different shades and colors of background. We wanted to see what would give the best translucency on the frost layers covering the glass, without revealing any of the exteriors. We did about 60 iterations before finding the right balance. We then covered the windows with several layers of CG frost passes, and within Shake, we added little glints on the highlights of the glass that would twinkle quickly and go away. After that, we put in three layers of CG snow globes: background, mid ground and foreground. For the background globes, we decided to have some fun and included humorous objects, such as a snowman on a tropical island. Since the globes were all rotating, we had to use CGI to create every object. We even included a three-dimensional image of the director, for which we projected still photographs onto 3D geometry.”

Each snow globe required at least 11 passes: a brass base with its own highlight, the 3D interior object, reflections, refractions, artificial snow, and finally, diffusion. “Multiply this by about 60 snow globes and you’ll get an idea of what this sequence involved,” Lingenfelser observes. “To create a realistic refraction, we actually flopped the live action image upside down and tracked it to the globes. Seeing the actors being refracted upside down really sold the whole concept of the room. This sequence is visually so rich that you probably need to view it ten or twenty times to really see the amount of detail that we put into it…”

The advantage of breaking the shots down in many passes was that it gave the team much more control to tweak the images and get exactly what the director wanted. “If Michael preferred to have, say, less reflections or less refractions, we could back them off in 2D without going back to the 3D stage and re-rendering. In the long run, it probably saved us time, because we had so much more control on the 2D side.”