3DA - What about the eyeballs?

Robert Zemeckis - The eyeballs are… that’s what we use the video reference for, because obviously the only thing we can’t glue dots to is the eyes. So what we do is we have to watch the video tape to know how to move the eyes.

Tom’s real eyes are scanned when we scan the whole body but we can change them. We can turn them into blue eyes, we can make them how we want them. But those are tracked.

Ken Ralston - Another thing with children is that we have 150 points, but Children don’t have as much developed expression on their face, so you couldn’t get as much information about a performance from a child as you can from an adult, because our faces mature and there’s more points of articulated reference. So adults give you more information about emotion performance than a child could. Just because of the physicality of their undeveloped face.

Robert Zemeckis - So an adult actor playing a child can put more subtle movement into the performance which in this case is a good thing, it could be a very peculiar thing, the kid could have a wisdom beyond his years and have too much subtlety of emotion if you’re not careful.

Ken Ralston - But if you’ve seen Tom in Big you know you’re in the hands of someone who can control it properly.

Ken Ralston - He did and we that to give a flavor in the design of the other child.

Steve Starkey - The four main children of the show all have a little taste of the actor playing them.

So basically Bob cast the as if we were actually going to shoot them in a live action film. We based it on those, we scanned all these kids in, and then we went back and we modeled the faces using photographs, like Nona Gaye who plays Holly she has such great eyes, that we didn’t wanna lose that expression. So that’s kinda built back into the child’s face.

Robert Zemeckis - I knew the book from around the mid 80’s when my son was born, you know, nice kid’s book and I didn’t think anything about it, and after we finished Cast Away Tom said “Do you know The Polar Express”, and I said “Yeah” and he said “Well what do you think? You think we can make a movie out of that?"

And I said “Oh man, I don’t know, it’s only 8 pages long”. So I started thinking about it and I started thinking “How could you do this, how is it possible? How could you do the north pole? How could you do the kids on a train? How could you do any of this?"

So I started thinking “what if there’s a way of doing it virtual? Digitally… And I started thinking of the story, and thinking “since the story is kind of a dream, and kind of in the tradition of the Wizard of Oz, Tom plays all these different characters, I said “maybe we could do this in the computer”.

So we went to Warner Bros, and we said we need some money, we need to do a test. To see how we would make this film.

We did a test with a video camera with live action actors against a green screen. And then we tested this system and this came back so spectacularly we just didn’t used the 2D versions at all. We did about a minute test to see if the technology was gonna work and we presented that to the studio and we decided to do it.

We shot the test in June of 2002 and then we started the movie in February 2003.