Travelers: Snowball begins with a man walking down a steep street. He crashes through a yard sale, before tumbling head-over-heels down the hill. As the man continues to roll he creates a snowball effect, accumulating objects from the street to create an enormous ball of urban debris. The ball continues to roll through the streets – and to grow. Finally, it smashes into a wall, releasing a shower of objects.

The biggest challenge from a visual-effects standpoint was the large number of digital objects and people Weta Digital had to create to form the ball. We built eight digital humans modeled on live-action actors, as well as an assortment of debris that would be found on any city street. We used extensive reference photography and a high-speed, high-resolution facial scanning system to aid us in creating models, textures, and shades that were as photorealistic as possible.

In some cases the plates were fabricated from digital photos shot with a consumer SLR. We cleaned up the stills, painted out static people and cars, removed signage, added camera moves to the cleaned still plate, animated and rendered the CG elements, and then composited everything together with liberal amounts of dust.

Visual FX Supervisor: Dan Lemmon; Visual FX Producer: Eileen Moran; Digital FX Supervisor: Chris White; Animation Supervisor: Paul Story

Weta Digital Ltd (NZ) is a four-time Academy-Award-winning visual-effects facility. Best known for its work on Peter Jackson’s masterpiece The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the recent King Kong, their film credits also include I Robot, X-Men: The Last Stand and Eragon. The company’s digital artists use the latest hardware, software and proprietary tools to create a world-leading creature pipeline with some of the most convincing digital doubles and digital environments in the industry.