Made in Montana

Much of The Snow Day was created in and around Montana's Yellowstone Country.

The film features landscapes and locations inspired by places including the Grasshopper Valley, Maverick Mountain, the Bridger Mountains, Big Sky, and the surrounding Custer Gallatin National Forest.

The North American bison also plays an important role in the film's visual world, connecting the story to one of the most iconic animals of the American West.

These aren't simply backdrops.

They are part of the story.

Montana is one of the characters.

The Filmmaker

Bryan Schaeffer is a Montana filmmaker, illustrator, animator, author, and creative director with more than 25 years of experience creating visual stories.

His work has included projects for organizations including Microsoft and Boeing, as well as commercial, editorial, animation, and publishing projects.

He has received three regional Emmy® Awards and is the founder of SINTR Studio, an independent creative studio based in Bozeman, Montana.

Many of the techniques used in The Snow Day were developed through two decades of commercial creative work. The film is Bryan’s first independent filmmaking project.

Director’s Statement

The Snow Day began with a simple desire: to make a film about the magic of winter, family, and the wild landscapes of Montana—and to make it in a way that felt genuinely handmade.

But the film's visual world actually began more than a decade before production.

For 10 years, I explored, photographed, sketched, and documented the landscapes of southwest Montana, building a personal library of locations, trails, seasons, and experiences. That journey eventually became my book The Last Best Trails, an illustrated guide to a select 100 trails to hike, bike, and ski throughout Montana's Yellowstone Country.

That decade of exploration became the foundation for The Snow Day.

I wasn't starting with a blank map. I already knew the landscapes. I knew where the light fell, where the snow accumulated, where a particular mountain ridge looked different in winter, and which places could become part of the story's visual language. The film grew directly out of that accumulated experience and connection to Montana.

From the beginning, I wanted The Snow Day to have the tactile quality of a hand-drawn storybook brought to life. We created original character designs, concept artwork, illustrated environments, and traditional special-effects plates to build the film's visual language. Thousands of individual drawings were then created frame by frame and assembled digitally at 12 frames per second.

Much of the production was intentionally practical and hands-on. We filmed live-action reference material with my family and in the Montana landscapes that inspired the story, using those experiences as the foundation for the animation and illustration.

The people, places, animals, and environments were not simply imagined—they were observed, photographed, drawn, and transformed into the world of the film.

This was a project I felt compelled to finish before my daughter moved beyond these fleeting years of childhood wonder—the youthful age when a snow day can still feel like the beginning of an impossible adventure, and anything seems possible.

Making a Film with Limited Resources

We created the entire film for under $60,000.

That budget required us to approach visual effects very differently from a traditional production. Rather than allowing financial limitations to dictate the scope of the story, we looked for ways to extend the original material we had already created.

For a small number of brief visual-effects sequences—designed to evoke the imaginative, practical-effects spirit of 1980s kids’ adventure films—we used Envato’s generative video tools to extend original photography and traditional special-effects plates. These effects were carefully developed from our own character designs, concept artwork, and photographed elements, allowing us to create short moments of cinematic magic while preserving the handmade visual language of the film.

These generated elements are supporting visual effects within a much larger visual system that is overwhelmingly based on hand-drawn animation, original artwork, practical photography, and live-action reference.

The technology was a tool that enabled us to create the imaginative realism with minimal budget.

The heart of the film remains thousands of human-made drawings, original concept art, practical effects, photography, and the landscapes and people who inspired them.

This film was built on sweat equity.

A Handmade Montana Film

There is something powerful about making a film with limited resources.

Constraints force you to become more inventive. They encourage you to look at your family, your surroundings, your tools, and your limitations differently.

In many ways, the entire project has followed that philosophy.

Ten years of exploring Montana became a book.

The book became a visual library.

The visual library became the foundation for a film.

My family became the actors and animation reference.

Weekend adventures became production days.

Thousands of drawings became animation.

And a very small independent studio became a filmmaking team.

The Snow Day became an experiment in what can happen when you combine traditional craft, emerging technology, real-world experience, and a deep connection to place.

It is a film built by hand, supported by technology, and rooted in a very real landscape.

Every limitation became an invitation to find another way.

Real people. Real places. Unreal Experiences.

Why I made this film

I grew up in Montana and have spent much of my life exploring its mountains.

The Snow Day grew out of a simple idea: What if one perfect snow day became an adventure big enough to change the way we see the world?

For more than three years, that idea became an unusually ambitious independent filmmaking experiment.

There was no traditional studio.

No large production crew.

No large animation department.

Instead, I built the film around the resources available to a small Montana creative studio—and my family.

We filmed reference material on weekend adventures. My daughters became actors and animation references. More than 3,000 hand-drawn images were created to build the animated world.

The limitations of the production became part of its identity.

Because the people, places, landscapes, and adventures in the film are drawn from our real lives, the story carries an authenticity that can’t be manufactured. It is a film born from genuine experiences, a deep connection to place, and the belief that the greatest adventures often begin in the world right outside our door.