Tippett Studio realized less than 10 shots, but all were highly complex. Its work included the frozen tundra of the North Pole as seen from the air, which required a CG plane to be created as well as an aurora borealis.

“I also created a simple plane that lived in the exact same location. I used an in-house shader in RenderMan to apply the original 8K height field as a displacement map on this simple plane and generate the actual terrain. This terrain was lit with some basic lighting, but had no shading other than a single, icy blue color. I then rendered a series of still frames of this basic, lit displacement and painted them up in Photoshop with all the details other than shadowing. These images were then projected from the same cameras used to originally render the base images onto the low-res obj imported from F.E.O. Finally, a ray-traced reflection pass was rendered and perturbed using a projected normal map to generate reflections of the aurora (which was originally created in 2D in comp).”

The elf village was modeled by Paul Zinnes, including 1,000 cards on which painted trees would be projected. Von Zastrow painted each of the houses in basic UV space and then rendered a single frame of the entire image in RenderMan with some basic lighting. He also rendered a single frame, from the same camera, of streetlights illuminating white buildings using mental ray and Final Gather. These images were combined in Photoshop and then painted on top of to give the final image of the elf village.

A big challenge for Tippett was linking the CG reindeers to the live-action sleigh with Allen and the rest of the actors sitting in it. Previs, greenscreen and motion control were all utilized.

As for cave, it was created in two stages. The first, the cave walls were done by painting projected displacement maps and rendering out still frames with basic lighting. Then, icy textures and details were painted to suggest massive ice walls. The mountains and terrain were accomplished more or less the same way as the exterior tundra shot.

Although the project was full of challenges, both technical and artistic, it ended up being one the most enjoyable films for Lingenfelser and the Furious FX team. “We were given the freedom by the director to shoot the way we needed in order to achieve the best effects. I couldn’t have dreamt of a more collaborative effort.”

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 and occasionally to Cinefex. Last year, he organized a major special effects exhibition at the Musée International de la Miniature in Lyon, France.