50 Things You May Not Know About Disney’s “Frozen” [UPDATED]

Creating Movements And Emotions

21. Character TD department is responsible for character rigging, cloth rigging, hair rigging, and simulation. Rigging can best be described as the character’s skeleton and muscles. Without it, the character would just be a sculpture. Aside from that, the character TD department will also build a set of controls that will establish a character’s movements. For them, it’s not just about the gross movement of the character, they are there to get the facial gestures just right.

22. One of the challenges of Frozen was that the TD department had to populate the entire kingdom with people. In this case, the department ended up building 312 character rigs, 245 cloth rigs, and 63 hair rigs. It’s more rigs the department has build than any of the other Disney films.

• To put that into perspective Anna’s character had 420,000 strands of hair; that’s 4.2 times more than a human.
• Just in case you care keeping count, in Tangled, Rapunzel had 27,000 strands of hair.

23. To cope with Anna and Elsa’s challenging Scandinavian hair braid style, the TD department built a new software called Tonic, which harks back to the hold barbershop days. Tonic used hair volumes and clumps, which would help build the strands and translate it into the vision. How the hair fell into place or if the character “had a bad hair day” helped the animators get an idea of how hair would work.

24. 245 cloth rigs is more than any other Disney film combined, twice over. The cloths in the film were inspired by mid 1800 costumes, gowns, and attire. All of which were very detailed, very intricate, and very layered.

25. The TD Department approached the cloths from a real world perspective. Using a pattern based approach. The team built new software called Flourish to capture the sheer, stretch, and gravity  in a more convincing way so they can best represent silks, wools, and other clothing based materials. For example, by adding motions to a horses’ stirrups or tassels, they can dictate its behavior or the way it moves.

Effects and Simulation

26. Some of the effects used for Elsa’s magic were in fact hand drawn and not added by CG. This includes key scenes of Elsa using her magic to freeze water.

27. Close interactions with snow like trudging through or digging snow was hard because the team wanted to create believable snow. According to the team, if you do not have the believability, the characters are just “floating” in the world, they are not “in it.”

28. Matterhorn is a snow generating software that was created specifically for this film.

• One instance called keyframing follows the rules of real world physics. Think of a ball bouncing upward from point a and how it arches downward to point b.
• In simulation the animators write their own rules, as long as they still follow the point a to point b concept.

29. The effects team were even conscious of how the wind would flow through hair and cloth. A variety of controlled simulations were done with the strength and length of the wind varying.

30. Motion capture work is even used in the animation field. One of the barriers between people and computers is interfacing programs. So when the effects team wanted to achieve something they couldn’t do just by animation alone, they would construct a draft of a scene, and using tracking devices (similar to motion capture technology) and six cameras in different positions of the room, would run through a scene.

• Since the entire dynamic of a scene can change in simply by moving the same camera in that virtual space, the team would take a 100 different shots and present five of the best ones to Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee, and/or John Lassester, who then approves one or maybe all five of the shots, which then would end up being in the final cut of the film.

31. There is a lot of real world phenomena that gets lost when it gets put into a real computer because it’s not there by default. As a layout artist, it is there job to take into consideration the real world anticipation, overlap, momentum, and physics that is built into our natural motion and transfer that into the computer.

The Science and Research of Frozen

32. To study the effects of snow and ice, Dr. Ken Libbrecht (aka Dr. Snow) of CalTech was brought in to show how snowflakes are formed. He showed that tiny little ice crystals form in the air and depending on the temperature and humidity that tiny ice crystal start to branch and plate, and this process is repeated until you get the snowflake that you see before you.

• When the team brought this to John Lassester, he was so excited that he gave them the idea of Elsa building her ice palace in the same branching and plating manner.  So watch Elsa’s musical number carefully as you will see branching and plating in action.  Even when the chandelier is forming, there is still branching and plating going on.

33. Part of the research also included a team of animators to travel to Norway to study the film’s organic environment. During their trip, the team found that the Kjerag rock formation was an excellent setting for the kingdom of Arendelle. The castle in Frozen is one of the first that is not in promontory setting or is very vertical. In fact it is one of the few castles that is actually flat as opposed to its dominating features. Instead kingdom is built to give off the feeling that it embraces the nature that surrounds it.

34. Rosemaling was another inspiration behind this film. It can be found in clothing, embroidery, small details, and even architectural environments like ceilings, walls, columns, window frames, furnature, etc. They even put rosemaling into these costumes. Not only would it make the world more cohesive, but it also gave the characters their own personality. Each character has their own shape language within the rosemaling.

• Anna is playful, she gets floral rosemaling.
• Hans being very elegant gets a more graphic designed rosemaling. In fact his costume is inspired by the Bunad designs that you would typically see in Norway.
• When Elsa leaves the kingdom, her costume is no longer inspired by rosemaling, instead it is inspired by snowflakes.
• There is hardly any rosemaling seen on Kristoff because of his character background.

35. The research in Norway also proved helpful in creating the costumes. The production team took into consideration the fact that if these characters would wear satin and free flowy material like Rapunzel did in Tangled, they would freeze to death. So they designed costumes that would based on heavier material like wool and velvet. Normally that would mean that these dresses are more structured in a certain way that doesn’t allow for secondary twirly movements. However, by pleating them, it does allow the characters to be more playful.

36. The research team also took a trip to Wyoming to study what it was like to walk and trudge through snow in a dress. Even the men took part in this study

37. Trips to different ice hotels in Quebec City were taken to study how light reflects and refracts off ice.

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