Christmas Carol Train Tour

Disney is coming out with a new A Christmas Carol movie this fall. It stars Jim Carrey (as Scrooge). It is supposed to be in 3-D and comes out November 6th, which is perfect because that's Bria's birthday. The movie is going to have the same type of animation as Polar Express.

To promote the movie, Disney has a Christmas Carol Train Tour traveling the country. It just happened to be in Albuquerque while we were there, so of course we wanted to go. Although, we just about turned around when we realized that there was a 1 1/2 hour wait just to get on the train. They kids did INCREDIBLE waiting in the heat and were SO excited by the time we got on the train.

Bion, Orion, Max and Bria waiting in line. We were standing right next to the train. It was SOOO hot!! Poor Orion only had a sweatshirt until Pa (grandpa) went and got him a t-shirt. The kids had a really hard waiting for so long!! Disney was really accommodating and gave all the kids in line activity worksheets to keep them busy. Every once in a while in line they had fake snow and a fan blowing cool water onto the waiting people. It was so strange thinking so much about Christmas on such a hot day! (In all fairness, though...it was a cooler day for Albuquerque, but for us northerners, it was pretty darn hot!)

Once we finally got on the train, it was amazing!! They had tons of concept art and costumes they used for the movie. I think a lot of the cool technical stuff went way over the kids heads, but it was fun to find out how they make movies like this.

The interactive computers were a hit! You could touch your finger anywhere on the map (like Tiny Tim's house) and the computer would fly you through the air and take you inside what it will look like in the movie. The kids could have probable stayed there all day!

When they make these new kind of animated movies, they build models of pretty much everything, but leave them white. Then, they film every possible angle to upload into the computer. Once it's on the computer, they add all the color. They had several of the actual models that were used to make the movie. It was cool!!