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" The narration at the very beginning of the filmthe little girl asking Santa about traveling so fast hed burn upwas clever and funny. What made you want to go technical and scientific with it? The questions at the start of the movie are the ones children really start to ask about Santa. Weve all heard them, or remember wondering about those things ourselves as we grew through childhood. You reach a point where you see a Christmas card image of Santa with his sack of presents and think, There arent enough toys in there for all the children in the world. And doubt sets in. A vague cough and Er, Santa uses special magic, honey . . . doesnt really wash. So the idea of the movie is simple: What would it really take, practically, to get Santas job done, in our real world?   It seems such an obvious concept that the Christmas operation should be just like everything else in the world our children live init has developed, modernized, moved with the times, adopted the latest and best technology to function within the modern world. We wanted kids to love and be excited by the idea of the amazing secret operation going on all round the worldand in their houseseach Christmas night.  The operation Santa has running is a well-oiled machine. Can you talk about the process of coming up with the numbers for it? How much math did you have to do?  Based on statistics I could find, I took the worlds population, estimated the percentage that celebrate Christmas, estimated the number of children under 12, then divided by an average number of children per household. That gave me a number of homes that had to be visited. I gave the North Pole 10 hours to complete the job, assuming they start at 6 pm on Christmas eve when darkness fallsthose early deliveries are a challenge for the elves!and give themselves a mission deadline of 4 am, so all is ready for those early risers.   I made a simple division: Half of that time was flying time, and half delivery. I worked on various sizes of elf army, and arrived at just under 1 million elves working in teams of three. If I gave 330,000 elf teams 5 hours (18,000 seconds) to deliver to the calculated number of households, I ended up with just over 18.14 seconds per team per household to make each drop. Of course, if the mission gets held up anywhere, as in the movie, the drop time has to be revised and the elves have to go even faster.   The other 5 hours are flying time. We had to assume the S-1 can travel exponentially faster than any other craft that exists in the world at present. I took my lead from the physicists [helping us]as long as we are talking multiples of the speed of sound, science will allow this to be theoretically achievable. If we had to posit that the S-1 traveled faster than the speed of light, we would be in a sci-fi world that is not considered possible. The times and distances are extremely hard to calculate, but just doing ballpark estimates, we werent in the realm of the speed of light. So I let myself off with the general idea that it was possible.   I also calculated figures for the old sleigh. If it had ever done the job, it too had to be able to go incredibly fast. I reckoned on it being able to go approximately twice round the world in an hourI worked on a maximum speed of around 45,000 mph. I varied the speed according to whether the sleigh was empty or had passengers, and since in our story some of the reindeer get lost from the sleigh, I also calculated speeds according to what percentage of its team of reindeer were pulling it. Then we calculated the distances between every point on the globe visited by the sleighwe found the latitude and longitude for every location and referred to a website which gave us distances between these.       You probably could have just made some numbers up, and no one would have been the wiser. Why go to all this effort? Children are smart. For our operation to be credible to them, even if they only see glimpses of it in full swing in the movie, it had to be thought out in depth. It had to work, not appear to be a fantasy that raised too many other questions. [Executive producer Peter Lord] and I are sticklers for detail. We wanted to convince ourselves about our world, we wanted to know it and fully imagine what this operation would really look like.   Having said that, you will probably have spotted one very big imaginative leap in all this: we decided to discount time zones and treat the world as if there is one single Christmas night. Pete and I had our most heated debates about this! In one way the idea of using time zones seemed exciting and real, but on balance the story needed a simple race against the clockthe idea that the present had to be delivered in the hours of darkness before the sun rose was compelling. If the sleigh were zigzagging round the globe in and out of daylight, that fought the story. Santas operation is also very high-tech. Did you look to any real-life gadgets or tech for inspiration? My design brief was: What would this operation look like if it had been built by a combination of the Pentagon, Hewlett Packard, Amazon, and UPS, with a bit of styling by Apple? I didnt want the gadgetry to be too sci-fi, more pushing the limits of what we already know is possible, in the style of [James] Bond or Mission Impossible.   In terms of inspirationwell, you might have noticed that the Handheld Operational and Homing Organizerthe touchscreen Hoho 3000has a big brother, the HoPad, as used by Steve. That got added to the design pack at a particular moment in the development, just as a number of our team acquired the latest new gadget from Apple. What were your favorite gadgets? How did you come up with them? I think my favorite is the gadget they have for taking a bite out of cookies, mince pies, and carrots left out for Santa and the reindeer. Its a high-tech steel arm with a comic-looking set of dentures on the end, for high-speed mechanical chomping. The comestibles are sucked up into back-mounted tubes that are emptied on return to the S-1. If you listen carefully you will hear the onboard computer announcing that they are converting milk and cookies to biofuel with which to power the S-1s engines.   Im also very fond of a detail on the S-1 dispatch deck that you will have to look hard to spot: Every elf hatch has a dispenser of hand-sanitizer beside it, for the modern hygiene-conscious elf to use between present deliveries.  The S-1 is a crazy ship. Did you look to any real-life tech while you were researching? For the exterior the most important thing was to retain a sense of the shape of the traditional sleigh, so that this ship was a thing of glory and a proper vehicle for Santa. For design reference, we looked at the sleek lines of the latest military stealth aircraft. I was also inspired by Star Treks Enterprise, which I think does a great job of looking like something built in a dock on earth, rather than being too alien.   Inside, we wanted the bridge of the S-1 to be like that of a supertanker or submarine or giant airplane, humming with quiet efficiency . . . It was important that it seemed organized in huge, infallible detail, down to every gift having a hidden barcode that ensures it is dispatched to the correct recipient.   But there are many jokes in there too, [and] bits of contemporary design and gadgetry to make the ship fun and relatable. Like all modern vehicles, the bridge comes equipped with cup holders into which slot the elves mugs of cocoa. The S-1 has a safety airbag at the helmsmans position; it has oxygen masks that descend in an emergency as in an aircraft. And there are buckets of coal behind safety glass, to be broken in case of a naughtiness emergency.  What was the most challenging part of the production? Creative and technical challenges included Mission Control, a set made of ice featuring 10,000 work stations and as many elvesa setup so complex that some individual shots took weeks to render. [There were also] character variation systems to produce an attractive army of elves, enormous numbers of screens requiring secondary animation and vast amounts of motion graphics; designing human characters who are shown in closeup doing detailed emotional acting.   The hardest thing for animation to pull off [is] flying sequencesif you are passing through the city of Toronto at incredible speed, what would you see; how big does your set have to be? Arthurs office, crammed with literally hundreds of Christmas props, each one of which had to be designed and modeled, the handheld-camera style used in a number of the action sequences, trying to achieve the spontaneity and imperfect energy of a live cameraman with computer tools . . . I could go on and on!  What do you hope peoplekids and adults aliketake away from the film? The story is not trying to pit the old versus the new, tradition versus modernityalthough the story appears to start out like that, we try to show in the end that that is a false and meaningless opposition. We wanted to say that its not how you do something that matters, its why. Our hero is a passion-person, someone who loves what he does for its own sake, not for glory or status or wealth or reward or thanks. 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