With no elves, no reindeer and around 85 visual effects shots, cbc tells its version of the classic Christmas story with the help of gvfx, Toronto/Vancouver.

Must Be Santa, the largest production ever undertaken by the pubcaster, unfolds in a North Pole never seen before, consisting of two mountain tops, one of which houses the Santa Senate, home of Tuttle, coo of the North Pole, played by Dabney Coleman (Buffalo Bill, Slap Maxwell).

The second peak is an amusement park full of games, rides and bright colorful lights. The park features a long steel slide lined with a blue fluorescent light which brings people up to the Pole and a roller coaster that ships them out, which is where the major effects work comes in.

The two-hour mow, directed by Brad Turner (Stargate SG-1, Major Crime) is about a down-on-his-luck loser, Floyd Court, played by Arnold Pinnock (The City), who’s chosen, perhaps by accident, to be the next Santa.

In this version of the story, everyone who lives at the North Pole is immortal except Santa, who must be replaced when it’s time to cross over to the angel side of the Pole.

To get potential Santas from Earth to the North Pole, a set of a SkyDome Hotel room (Toronto is playing itself) was built on risers eight feet in the air surrounded by stunt pads laid on the ground in front of giant green screens. Stunt people ran towards and dove through a window while the camera dollied behind them and tilted down as they fell.

On their way down, the actors are replaced with cg versions of themselves, created in Maya and later composited on Inferno by Barb Benoit and Janeen Elliott, and integrated with shots of the actual SkyDome Hotel, which according to gvfx president John Gajdecki is one of the coolest things about the project.

‘It’s a kids’ show so there is a certain amount of slap-stick and a certain amount of physical comedy,’ says Gajdecki. ‘The stunts are being done with a lot of stunt people, but when they are bigger, crazier things, we are using computer-generated actors so we can get the bigger, wider shots.’

As they fall down, still on the journey to the Pole, the voyagers are swooped up, fly out the roof of the SkyDome and through the air above the clouds in a kind of time warp towards the frosty fantasy land.

To get leads Pinnock and Deanne Miligan accustomed to flying and to ensure a natural look, the actors practised hanging on wires in front of a green screen three days prior to shooting the actual flying sequence.

In order to get the flight just right, Gajdecki watched movies involving humans in flight such as Superman and Hook, but in the end got his cue from flying objects as opposed to superheroes, and edited together clips of space ships from Star Wars and underwater action from The Abyss to use as a blueprint for flight.

When it came to getting people out of the North Pole via the roller coaster, gvfx animators David Alexander and Ray Caesar modeled and rendered a ‘crazy’ 3D sequence of the roller coaster in action using Maya. The sequence gave the director a model to work from, so that instead of just winging it on set everybody had an idea of what the shot would look like. The live-action footage was shot to match the 3D version.

For Gajdecki, the challenges of Must Be Santa were in keeping the effects photo-realistic but in a fantastical style, which he says is more difficult than straight photo realism.

‘When we are doing a big matte painting like we do for Stargate, they just have to look real,’ he explains. ‘This show is supposed to be fantasy but still has to be real.’

To ensure that the North Pole had an otherworldly feeling, the director and dop Bert Dunk took a different approach to each locale.

Anything on Earth was shot with a traditional polished studio look, ‘very It’s A Wonderful Life,’ says Turner, ‘with typically set up beautiful close-ups and great lighting.’

Up in the North Pole, a Technocrane was used for huge sweeping floating moves that make it look more ‘poetic and lyrical,’ according to the director.