Creation of Christmas elves, reindeer and cats for "The Christmas Chronicles 2"

When the first Chronicles of Christmas The film premiered on Netflix two years ago, was praised for its originality, great visuals, and a winning cast led by Kurt Russell as good old Santa. This year, Santa and Mrs. Claus (Goldie Hawn) are back in action in a sequel directed by veteran director Chris Columbus, best known for directing family classics such as Lady Doubtfire, Two Home alone film and the first two Harry Potter go out and to write Gremlins e The Goonies. Since its debut on Netflix on November 18th, The Chronicles of Christmas 2 has become one of the biggest hits of the streamer season.

One of the sequel's secret weapons is its colorful and believable visual effects, which were made by a team of around 500 people at Weta Digital led by visual effects supervisor Martin Hill, animation supervisor Nick Stein, effects supervisor sequence visuals Phil Leonhardt and visual effects supervisor Thrain Shadbolt. Hill, who won a Primetime Emmy for overseeing the visual effects for season eight of Game of Thrones (2019), says he was looking forward to something bright and family-oriented after working for a year and a half in the darkest world Game of Thrones.

“This movie had Santa, elves, fantastic creatures and Christmas primary colors and a lot of comedy, so it was a breath of fresh air,” says Hill. "I had a fantastic meeting with Chris Columbus in April 2019 and we had a lot of fun pitching ideas. One of the best things about getting started early in the process was that our forecast supervisor Marco Spitoni was able to start giving shape to the vfx shots. We had predicted about 60 percent of the shots and they actually ended up being very close in timing to what we see in the final version of the film. "

One of the first scenes Hill and his team worked on was the large shot of Santa and his reindeer gliding across the forest as he chases Jola the cat Yule. “This is our first Santa revelation, and it was one of the first things we introduced to Chris,” says Hill. "We synchronized the scene with Led Zeppelin's" Immigrant Song "and it's all set in this beautiful arctic land (shot in Vancouver). The camera drops like a drone camera and then we see the shot from the sleight of hand point of view. , like a sleigh camera, and then Jola rushes into the shot. We didn't end up using the song in the final version, but it worked perfectly. It was the first shot we showed everyone who got on board to work. on the effects with us ".

Warning! Manic elves at play

Hill conjures up a crazy scene in which the elves are infected with Elfbane, a substance that makes them manic. "One thing we had to figure out was how crazy we make them," he says. “It was interesting to see how we could create cartoons without detaching ourselves too much from reality, since these digital characters had to look real and interact with the environment like human actors. We have been consistently able to push it further and further into the Looney Tunes-real how the scene escalates. We even see their eyes rotate in opposite directions when hit in the head! "

Stein points out that he and his team have done a lot of testing on how to get elves to move. They did some testing on the motion capture phase and tried keyframes as this is one of the best ways to get smaller creatures to move. He notes: "We chose a combination of the two techniques because we wanted to give them a more thoughtful feel, even if they are smaller in size."

"We had a reference treasure to go to from the first movie, but said we wanted to take it a step further and leave our mark too," says Stein. “We wanted the audience to relate again and not think these characters were different from the first movie. We stayed in the realm of the first movie, but we wanted more weight and ground feel for the 40cm (about 1,3ft) tall elves. "

Among the 780 visual effects that Weta prepared for the film, the party scene gave Weta the opportunity to let go and go crazy with the elves: "As we built the shots, we came up with all the tricks to combine the different styles. together. The party scene allowed us to freak out and have fun, ”reveals Stein.

Overall, the Weta team created 621 unique elves for the Santa sequel. “Sure, you can see they're brothers. They are quite similar. We gave them mustaches and hats, and our costume and fabric shop did a great job of providing us with a whole range of costume variations, also based on Christmas sweaters. They also have variants of fur and hair. "

Stein points out that the Forest Elves that appear in some flashbacks and also see themselves in the poinsettia reload scene are quite different. He explains: “They were the antithesis of the other elves… We took some of our hero elves and made them thinner, giving their hair a slightly more earthy color. This gave us a lot of flexibility when we were thinking about coming up with the backstory of why Belsnickle hates humans so much, so we had these scenes where humans were chasing elves in the forest - and we gave them these great expressions of fear. "

A Cool Yule Cat

Another fun digital character created for the film was Jola the Yule Cat, who injures Dasher after he is freed by Belsnickel, an elf turned human (played by Hunt for the Wilder PeopleJulian Dennison) in the reindeer stable. Hill says a scene where Jola appears behind Belsnickel and gives him a big lick on the face is one of her favorites in the film.

To create that scene, the team used a large maquette of Jola's head with two special effects puppeteers behind it that gave the actor a big push, to which he reacted naturally. “We attached a large sponge to the model that acted as a giant tongue, then they turned it over to give him a lick on the face, and he looked really shocked,” recalls Hill. "Then, Speck, one of the elves, jumps off Jola and dances on Julian's shoulder. We also had another little puppet with two small legs that just pushed around his shoulder pads, it really helped sweeten the integration in the recovery ".

Hill also states that most of the elf clothing and animal fur were created using Weta's proprietary renderer, Manuka. "When there are these scenes where all these elves are wearing knitted wool tops and each of them has all these little flying fibers, and the renderer can take all of that and just run with it," the supervisor says. “Now, our experienced team of CG supervisors can optimize their scenes efficiently. They don't have to worry about adding a few more elves or double the elves when needed. "

The Chronicles of Christmas 2 is currently streaming on Netflix.