In the opening shot of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," the camera takes a ride through the crystalline contours of a snowflake, transporting the viewer to tiny, whimsical Whoville. The journey sets the stage for a brief stay in a world where houses seem to spring from mountainsides, sunrises scream with color and one grumpy Grinch discovers love in the Christmas season. Faithful to the illustrations of beloved children's author Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel), whose book was published in 1957, Digital Domain (DD) helped director Ron Howard create a world that is at once magical and painstakingly real.

"Snowflake"

"Ron described himself as the keeper of story. He'd listen to ideas from anybody, but was very selective about what he would use," VFX supervisor Kevin Mack said. Sitting in the rustic, high-ceilinged Venice, Calif., offices of DD, Mack, CG supervisor Matthew Butler and compositing supervisor Bryan Grill agreed that working with Howard on "Grinch" was a uniquely collaborative process. Howard understood that the quality of the film depended on striking a balance between his own ideas and the ideas of his crew. "If the person who was doing the work had an idea that serviced the story as well as Ron's idea, he went with their idea because they would passionately execute it," Mack said. Ultimately, though, the team always had to answer the question, "Does this effect further the story?" Executive producer Nancy Burnstein and visual effects producer Julian Levy also were part of the team at DD, while Kurt Williams was the VFX producer for Imagine Entertainment.

The question became especially crucial because the crew was working with a story that is loved by so many. Mack excitedly said he'd discovered that each person on the crew had a personal relationship with the stories of Dr. Seuss. "I was raised on it, my kids have been raised on it and I found out that virtually everyone involved had the same exact experience," he said. Howard and DD worked to meld all of these ideas into a cohesive vision, while keeping in mind the familiarity of the viewing audience with this tale about the true meaning of Christmas. Production designer Michael Corenblith and director of photography Don Peterman echoed this sentiment in their interviews with CinematographyWorld.

Working with an imaginary world was both a challenge and a blessing for Mack and his team at DD. The ambitious nature of Howard's concept of "The Grinch" meant much of the atmosphere surrounding Whoville had to be created digitally. As the work progressed, Mack found that the more they created digitally, the simpler shots became. "We had this world, we could stage it, get exactly what we wanted, try different things -- once it's computer-generated, it's all one world and we have more control," he said. Sequences that initially were intended to contain physical backgrounds and elements became CG, as the difficulty of tracking in elements became more burdensome than animating them.

For instance, the sleigh ride the Grinch takes down Mt. Crumpit and into Whoville was shot with Jim Carrey (the Grinch) and Taylor Momsen (Cindy Lou Who) on bluescreen. The second unit shot background plates of a snowy hill in Utah, and the actors and the sleigh were to be composited into the shot. But the weather in the background plates of Utah wasn't the same as the weather in Whoville. Neither did the flora of Utah quite match the fantastical trees in Seuss' story. And DD had already created a photo-realistic sleigh for the shot in which all of Whoville's Christmas gifts teeter above a panorama of snowy cliffs. So artists generated the sleigh and the backgrounds, using a complex procedural system to create details such as swaying bags of gifts, and snow kicked up by the sleigh's runners. Even the Grinch's dog, Max, is 3D animation at times.