Fred Claus
Cinesite created the spectacular sleigh flight sequence for Warner Bros.’ Fred Claus, directed by David Dobkin.
Fred is the embittered older brother of the all-good Nicholas (Santa) Claus, who is sent to jail and his only recourse is to turn to his brother. Santa agrees to bail him out on the condition that Fred returns home to the North Pole and enter the family business.
Fred agrees and subsequently has the mammoth task of global Christmas Eve present delivery and this is where Cinesite came in. We created the sleigh flight sequences with our in-house VFX Supervisor Simon Stanley-Clamp overseeing the effort. Our work included seven CG reindeer a CG sleigh, CG doubles of Fred and Willy, Fred’s elf helper, stratospheres, clouds, Chicago background plates and head replacements.
Each of the seven reindeer were individually textured and modeled on the real reindeer used on set so are completely photo real with their own personalised characteristics and markings. The reindeer’s fur is fully 3D and developed using Cinesite’s in-house fur system CSFur.
We created most of the sleigh ride scenes, with in-house visual effects supervisor Simon Stanley-Clamp overseeing the effort with VFX producers Angie Wills and Cath Duncan. The extreme speed of the sleigh implied that a lot of physical ground was being covered so a huge 3D environment was constructed in Houdini for the underlying cityscapes. For the wider shots featuring the actors and practical sleigh, a 3D track was generated from the live action plate and our reindeers were added into the shot. This involved attaching the hitching gear of our CG to the practical sleigh at the linkage, and hand animating our CG reins from the reindeers to line up with the actors’ hands.
We also worked on head replacements and created CG digital doubles of Fred and Willy, Fred’s elf helper. Willy was played by John Michael Higgins but with the body of Jorge Rodero. We stitched the head of John Michael Higgins on to the body of Jorge using an in-house bespoke tracking system.
For the digital doubles Cyberscans were taken of Fred in normal clothing with photography of him in both the Santa Costume and normal clothing. For Willy both full size and elf size Cyberscans and turntable photography were taken.
