The White Stuff...
It's in the rules... Christmas equals snow. Never mind that you're unlikely to see any here in Britain around the festive season. I'm in my sixty-fifth year and I can recall only a handful of Christmases when there was snow on the ground, the last of them now fourteen years in the past. I've always found it perverse that the bookmakers' definition of a white Christmas demands snow to fall from the sky on December 25th – even if it's only one flake. Rubbish. A proper white Christmas should be defined as lying snow on the ground on Christmas Day, whether it's still falling or not – because it's the asethetic that's important.
Dickens usually gets the blame for the adoption of snow as part of the iconography of Christmas, and he was only describing what he saw himself – he happened to be living during an era that has since been characterised as the ‘little ice age’ when winters were notably colder and snowier here in the UK. Now we live in an era of global warming, so should we expect fewer white Christmases? The met office have already (rashly) predicted it as a possibility for this year, but when it gets to December, forecasters become like parents trying to encourage their childen to believe in Santa Claus. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Either way, snow is now indelibly associated with the festive season, and if you happen to be making a film set at this time of year, this can present you with a problem. Getting the real thing is next to impossible, unless you’re shooting in a guaranteed snowy location, and in the absence of genuine snow, film makers have fallen back on various special effects tricks to create the impression of blizzards and Christmassy scenes.
Faking up snow for the cameras goes back to the dawn of movie making. Early Hollywood methods employed substances including cotton, flour and salt: but the LA fire department, recognising the fire hazard inherent in cotton recommended an alternative, fire-resistant substance. White or chrysotile asbestos was, believe it or not, sold under various brand names including ‘White Magic’, ‘Snow Drift’ and ‘Pure White’, aimed at movie productions, where it was employed widely until the 1950s. You could even buy it for use in the home. Movies including The Wizard of Oz, White Christmas, It’s a Wonderful Life and Holiday Inn all made use of white asbestos to create the effect of falling snow.
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| I'd get out of that stuff if I were you – asbestos snow falls on Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life. |
Back in 1930, Laurel and Hardy’s short film Below Zero used a variety of techniques to give the impression of falling and settled snow, and asbestos was probably one of them. Although there’s no record of the methods employed in the production (which went before the cameras in late February/ early March of 1930), we can hazard a few educated guesses. The snowballs which hit Ollie in the face are clearly made of some kind of food product: ice cream, mashed potato or creamed rice: you can see the stuff trickling down his cheeks in little white rivulets, exactly the way that snow doesn't...
To achieve the effect of falling or settled snow, film makers have used any number of white crystalline substances. Salt was an obvious answer, but others have included borax (soap powder), gypsum and even ammonia crystals. It could be a risky business: Lon Chaney died after ingesting ‘fake snow’ on a movie set, and the cast of Space:1999 suffered adverse reactions to chemical snow blasted at them during the filming of an episode set on an ice planet. More benign alternatives, commonly employed in theatrical productions, include feathers, shredded paper, breakfast cereal and potato flakes.
The trouble with all forms of fake falling snow is that the dry materials generally used on film sets simply don’t behave like the real thing: instead of accumulating, they just blow around on the ground. Settled snow was usually achieved using foam. There’s lots of this on show in RKO’s Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life. The studio’s special effects head, Russell Shearman, went to the trouble of developing a new process to achieve the snow so essential to the production, using a combination of foamite (fire-fighting foam), salt, soap flakes, sugar and water. Although it looks passable on screen, you can tell it’s not the real thing: ‘chemical snow’ doesn’t have the density of real snow, being comprised essentially of bubbles as opposed to crystals: and crystalline substances have always yielded the most convincing artificial snow effects on screen.
The Shining may not be a Christmas movie, but it has some of the best fake snow effects I've ever seen. Back in 2014, during redevelopment work at Elstree studios, contractors discovered a lot of bags of white powder, which when analysed, was found to be one of the products used to create the snow scenes in Kubrick's production. Formaldehyde foam, which hardens on contact with the air, was used to build up huge drifts which were then coated in salt to create the essential crystalline effect.
Fake snow isn’t always confined to the studio: many productions are obliged to deploy it on location. Today’s concern for the environment demands eco-friendly processes using ‘food grade’ materials that will decay naturally: 'bio-degradable snow' if you will. On miniature sets, different materials are required to achieve the correct scale when faking up blizzards or lying snow. Gerry Anderson’s productions probably employed baking soda and salt and achieved some convincing effects. Brains even does it himself in the Christmas Thunderbirds where he contrives to shower Tracy Island with artificial snow.
Some of the best miniature snow I’ve ever seen was in a wintry edition of Postman Pat (above) where the stuff really does mimic the appearance and texture of real world snow. It was most probably wet salt.
One of the few films I can bring to mind that’s set at Christmas and includes real snow and ice is On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, locations for which were shot in Switzerland during October, November and December of 1968. Although the production was favoured with snow, the season’s fall had been weaker than usual and filming ran 56 days over schedule as a result. Despite the profusion of real snow on screen, there were still a few scenes that required fakery. Salt was used in one sequence, and foam in another.
Today, there are all manner of products sold for model makers wishing to create artificial snow, but you can do it yourself quite simply and safely using baking soda mixed with hair conditioner, or alternatively shaving cream. Just don't eat it, kids...
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