Some 6,000 gallons of this new pseudo-snow were used in the making of It’s a Wonderful Life, and the RKO Effects Department received a Technical Award from the Motion Picture Academy for the development of the new white stuff. The foamite solution was pumped at high pressure through a wind machine to create the look of freshly fallen snow on trees, streets and in drifts against buildings. Utilizing technology made available after World War II, Sherman’s crew mixed foamite - the material used in fire extinguishers and sometimes marketed under the brand name Phomaide-with sugar and water (or, by some accounts, with soap flakes) to create a substance that could be sprayed virtually anywhere, tucking tiny Bedford Falls under a wintery blanket of white. For It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra, who was trained as an engineer, and RKO studio’s special effects wizard, Russell Sherman, developed their own artificial snow, one befitting the hushed beauty of a winter night in the fictional town of Bedford Falls. Movie snow in the early decades of film-making was usually white-coated cornflakes, sometimes mixed with shaved gypsum, and they produced so much audible crunching and crackling when actors walked across it that dialog was often over-dubbed afterwards.

The look and feel of holiday movies would, quite simply, never be the same again.

LIFE photographer Martha Holmes documented the use of an innovative new snow-making process employed during the making of It’s a Wonderful Life-a process that, for the first time, allowed filmmakers to produce and control remarkably realistic onscreen snowfalls, drifts, flurries and landscapes. For this film Capra decided that the cheap “fake snow” so often used on movie sets back in the day simply would not do he wanted something as close to the real thing as he and his prop department could get.

Far more than a mere plot device heralding George Bailey’s dark night of the soul (and his joyful return to the land of the living), softly falling snow is something of a central character in Frank Capra’s 1946 holiday classic, It’s a Wonderful Life.

How long is it's a wonderful life