When we were chatting with Santa Claus the other day when he visited the office, he thanked us repeatedly for the we imparted on a movie that is near and dear to his heart. The Polar Express starred him after all.

(Cue swirly time machine / dream effect)

Back in 2003, before our first full ride project as The Gravity Group, we received a telephone call from a very excited Steve Boyd. He said Bob (as in the famous Robert Zemekis), he and Tom Hanks had secured the rights for and were making The Polar Express book by Chris Van Allsburg into a new feature film. Certainly we were excited about this, but were wondering how we fit into this discussion.

Soon, Steve started to share their vision for this film and in particular one unique scene. In the book, as the Polar Express train journeys to the North Pole, it describes:

We climbed mountains so high it seemed as if we would scrape the moon. But the Polar Express never slowed down. Faster and faster we ran along, rolling over peaks and through valleys like a car on a roller coaster.

images from Google Books

In Steve and Bob’s discussions, they envisioned this scene to look and feel like an out of control wooden roller coaster racing over the hills and careening around the bends. So they wanted advice from us as the wooden roller experts to understand what this sequence would look like realistically so it can then be animated, pulling that reality slightly into fantasy.

The next step was for them to send us an animation for us to review. Steven then put us in touch with Oscar-winning Doug Chiang of Doug Chiang Studios who would be creating the concept of this roller coaster sequence. Doug was a very friendly guy known for his work as visual effects art director on many films including Star Wars: Episode I and Terminator 2 to name a few.

Soon Doug had sent us a DVD with a rough animation for us to review. As we had not been a part of anything like this before it was pretty awesome seeing some behind-the-scenes footage on something like this.

Here are some stills from the video they sent us.

Once we saw the video, we had a lot of fun critiquing it and capturing how to enable the team to see how this could become a realistic wooden roller coaster.

Some of the five page play-by-play included the following snippets.

00:14:00 – It may look better to maintain speed over this hill by lowering it. This clip shows the 4th hill on Shivering Timbers at Michigan’s Adventure.

00:21:23 – This peak looks too sharp, try smoothing it out to something like this clip of the second hill of The Raven at Holiday World.

00:27:00 – There is an odd flat spot here. I would suggest making it into a hill like that on the Lake Compounce’s Boulder Dash video at 1:13-1:20.

00:39:00 – This looks like it could use some variety, some minor left-right curves and/or double downs (like 00:32:00) would be cool.

One of the things we stressed in our discussions was that all good wooden roller coasters have a plethora of airtime.  This is one of the ingredients we felt was in short supply in the animation.  The final film sequence ended up having much more airtime.  It even had a portion of the story surrounding weightlessness where a stray cotter pin needed to be grabbed during freefall that would help brake the runaway train.

Fortunately, Santa Claus was pleased with our efforts as were Steve, Doug and Bob.  This project remains the most unique and different project on which we have worked to date.  So now, when you ride the roller coaster Polar Express with your family around the holidays, be sure that everyone holds their hands up high and scream like you are on your favorite Gravity Group wooden roller coaster.  Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy New Year!

‘Cause that’s the way things happen on the Roller Coaster – The Polar Express!