'X-Files' film is one big snow job

There's show business, and then there's snow business. Andres Dominguez gets to dabble in both. The Chile-born, Canada-raised Dominguez spent 14 years as a sawmill and prop mill engineer before "I just got bored," he says. In 1991, a friend helped him land a job at a special-effects company, and since then, he's worked on films including "Seven Years in Tibet," "Fantastic Four" and "X-Men: The Last Stand." His first major snow biz job, however, was 1999's powder-packed "Snow Falling on Cedars." "That's big-time snow," he recalls.

Snow looms large in the paranormal “The X-Files: I Want to Believe,” due in theaters Friday, and Vancouver-based Dominguez, 45, operated as the lead snow man, making sure the Canadian set was sufficiently coated.

Winter wonderland: While shooting on location in downtown Vancouver, Dominguez says his initial instruction was to make the set look "like Alaska: completely covered." But the city doesn't get a lot of snowfall, so budget restraints kept the shoot limited to melty snow drifts. "We ended up with a look where it had snow on the sidewalks and the streets are kind of wet," he says.

Since the set covered some six city blocks, Dominguez had to glue paper snow on foam piles to create snow berms in some areas. But his greatest challenge was working within the city's time frame. "We would have maybe four or five hours to bring snow in, dress the street and then get rid of it," he says. "Fortunately, because they wanted it to look like it was melting, it didn't really matter that it was clean or dirty."

On thin ice: Some of the city snow came as ice chips from nearby fisheries, which was then dispersed with a mulch blower. Dominguez also collected Zamboni shavings from ice-skating rinks in the area. "You're doing them a favor because it costs money to get rid of it," he says. "They appreciate us taking it away as much as we appreciate having it for free." Plus, "it's a lot easier than going up and getting the snow from the mountains."

The snow must go on: After Vancouver, the cast and crew moved production about 100 miles north to a remote outpost near Whistler called Pemberton. Some of his time was spent dressing the set, using rakes and trail-grooming snowcat vehicles. For bigger jobs, he relied on a snow-making machine -- his own mini version of the snow guns used at ski resorts -- to create a flurry. "To make snow, you need lots of air and high-pressure water," he explains. Ideal temperature conditions are "if the weather's below zero [Celsius] and low humidity. So when it was minus 10, the machine was running full on. . . . If you do a flat area, you can probably put a layer of snow 4 inches high in five hours."