For Mat Beck, the challenges on The X-Files: I Want to Believe included dealing with many scenes involving snowy winter storms and landscapes. ™ & © 2008 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.

When it came time for Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files TV series and director and co-writer of the new Fox feature film The X-Files: I Want to Believe (now playing), to pick a visual effects supervisor, Mat Beck at Entity FX was really the only choice.

Not only was Beck the supervisor on the franchise's first movie in 1998, he was also a visual effects producer on the TV series and even wrote the third-season episode, Wetwired. Returning to The X-Files was like coming home, Beck says, and being familiar with the production and the style Carter prefers for his creation was a definite advantage.

"He has a definite style and a definite point of view," Beck adds, "Chris puts a lot of faith in his audience to appreciate the production value that's there and also to fill in the things that are kind of hidden from sight one way or another. I think that philosophy informs this movie as well."

As usual, coming into the film the schedule was very tight and the number of shots that were going to be needed was at first indeterminate and then tripled late in the schedule. That made the biggest challenge just one of the logistics of trying to get the work done on time.

Then came the plot -- which has been kept under tight wraps -- and many scenes involving snowy winter storms and landscapes.

Dealing with snow was particularly difficult because no two snowfalls are exactly the same. "We had to have believable snow in a bunch of shots that had to have continuity with shots that were practical snow," continues Beck. "And then, overall, there had to be an evolution of the snow through certain scenes to kind of set an emotional tone. And so we had different kinds of snow and different levels of snow and different scenes in which snow had to be inserted. So we needed to generate some tools in house to give the capability to do it quickly."

The result was a program called Frosty, which was written by David Alexander. Beck says Alexander, head of 3D on the film, wrote the program in Mel, the scripting language for Maya and had it drive Maya's particle engine through Sprite. Beck says the program is basically an interactive snow generator with about 50 controllable variables dealing with wind turbulence, where it falls and how it interacts with other objects. It also controls various types of blurring, including motion blur, lens blur and atmospheric blur, all of which have to be dealt with in the right order in order to look real, Beck says.

Once Frosty was up and running and integrated into the pipeline, Entity was able to generate the custom snow elements that most vfx shots in the movie needed. As the schedule got tighter, Beck says Entity shared Frosty and some of the elements with such companies as Illustrated Arts, Hybrid and Frantic Films to get the movie done.