Since he spends most of the film as a snowman, Keaton only physically worked on-set for about three weeks of the shoot. Consequently, both in pre-production and in early production, he had to record Frost's dialogue without ever having seen the puppet in action. "I'd never done anything like that before," Keaton notes. "It's like shooting in the dark. I'd seen no footage of the snowman, so I didn't know what he was doing. Troy would tell me his emotions and I would act them out with my voice."

For his role as Charlie, Joseph Cross underwent some extensive training of his own, learning to play ice hockey. "For two weeks, we had hockey camp five days a week for three hours straight with all of the kids in the movie. The first few days were really hard, but then it got to be pretty cool," he recalls. But probably the most unique experience for Cross was acting with a 5'6" snowman. "When I first saw him, we were in pre-production, doing a costume fitting on camera. And they had the snowman there, and he was talking. It's really amazing how they can make him sad and happy and give him all these emotions."

© 2000 Warner Bros.