Hungarian Horntail is the label given to a Dragon species in Joanne Rowling’s Harry Potter series of novels. Specifically, one single individual of this monstrous species appears in the fourth book, The Goblet of Fire, as the first trial of the Triwizard tournament. The Dragon guards a golden egg, which has to be obtained avoiding the beast’s fiery rage. In the novel, the task, while certainly difficult, was resolved relatively quickly — with the aid of Harry’s broom; in the film adaptation, the Dragon breaks free from its chain and chases the wizard in a long action sequence, which ends with the beast falling into a chasm. it is unclear if the Hungarian Horntail survived or not.

Both the novel and the script for the film adaptation are not detailed in their description of the Dragon. The most recognizable trait is the creature’s tail — which ends in a spined, club-like protrusion, used for offense — hence the name ‘Horntail’. Paul Catling, designer of most creatures from the Harry Potter series, had considerable creative liberty on the design of the Dragon. The special effects team, however, set out to make a spectacular, surprising creature. “The biggest challenge is to make them not look like what anyone else has done,” said Nick Dudman. “So when you’re doing dragons, werewolves, anything that’s iconic you hit a problem because a lot of the good ideas have already been done, so you have to find a different angle.”

Concept art by Paul Catling.

In the tradition of DragonSlayer, and in line with the first film of the series, the final Hungarian Horntail features a Wyvern-like configuration, with a total of four limbs. The front hindlegs also served as the creature’s formidable wings. The dorsal region of the creature, starting from the back of the head itself, presents a series of bony thorns, some of which can be moved in a threatening manner — much like a crest or a frill. The namesake thorned club at the end of the tail was kept.

Once again, Nick Dudman and his special effects team took on the duty to bring the Dragon to the screen. Two small scale maquettes were sculpted, created in fibreglass and painted for reference — both for the computer generated model and the imposing, full-size animatronic model. Kate Hill led the creation of the full-size sculpture, aided by Waldo Mason, Andy Hunt and other sculptors. The creature’s skin, created in Polyurethene, was also painted by Hill and Mason. The thorns on the Dragon’s head, neck and back were created in coloured resin, and were of 6 different sizes; a total of 200-300, including ‘backup’ thorns (in case the mounted ones broke) were made. The larger spikes were reinforced with fibreglass matting. Each thorn was individually hand finished, and painted once put in place on the Dragon.

The finished full-size Horntail animatronic. The thorns on the head and back of the creature were actually sharp and pointed — as you can see, the ones on the head are covered with rubber protections.

The finished Dragon animatronic was mounted on a mobile, wheeled unit — which eased transport of the enormous prop. The head could turn around and roar, the wings could make limited movements and the body was able to move from side to side. Peculiar to this model was an actual fire-breathing function, installed in the neck of the animatronic by John Richardson’s mechanical effects team. Due to that, obviously, the internal and external materials of the head were made fireproof.

In the final version of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the practical model was unfortunately left entirely unused, replaced by the computer generated model (created by Industrial Light & Magic) in all the scenes scheduled for its appearence. The practical Horntail would, however, have brief time of glory during the film’s world premiere in London.

The Horntail animatronic with the flame-throwing feature in action.

Special thanks to Shaune Harrison, who provided most of the information and pictures featured in the article and gallery.

For more pictures of the Hungarian Horntail, visit the Monster Gallery.

Before 1981, no motion picture had brought to the screen a character identifiable as an iconic Dragon villain. Spanning from The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad to The Brothers Lionheart, cinematic Dragons did not have considerably expanded antagonistic roles in the motion pictures they were featured in — Film audiences had yet to see an imposing, fire breathing villain. That was the objective the creative minds behind Dragonslayer had set for themselves: they wanted to create a memorable, formidable Dragon creature using the most advanced among the available technologies. Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins wrote the script for Dragonslayer (with Robbins being the director), and since its inception they were concerned about the complexity of bringing the monstrous beast to the screen.

As often happens in Hollywood, old friendships aided them in their goal. Barwood told Fangoria in 1981: “Luckily, through our friendships with Lucas and Spielberg, we got a very close side-line view of the making of Close Encounters, the making of Star Wars, and the formation of Industrial Light & Magic. We had a pretty fair idea of how this would be done, just from our knowledge of how these films in general are made. We knew what could be done, in general, and which things could never be done, so we wrote within those limits — which must be recognized, even with today’s high-technology special effects.” He added in a Cinefex article, “We were close onlookers, if not actual participants; and as a result, we had our wits about us when we started the project.”

Lucas, Spielberg and their films were in fact the very first inspiration for the two writers. The idea for Dragonslayer dates back to 1979; Barwood and Robbins were trying to produce a romantic comedy film, but were plagued with unavailability of appropriate (or ‘bankable’, as Barwood said) actors for the lead roles. “We thought,” Barwood told Cinefex, “‘There’s a way to free ourselves from that kind of pressure and also head for a different kind of territory in terms of commercial possibilities.’ What we particularly got interested in was taking the maturing special effects technology, as seen in Close Encounters and Star Wars, and adapting that to a different kind of storytelling-dramatic venue which we liked better; and that was a fantasy idea.”

Barwood and Robbins’ romantic comedy was abandoned, in favor of a diametrically opposite species of film: a dark fantasy thriller, with a terrifying Dragon as its main antagonist. Vermithrax Pejorative, described as 40 feet long and with an impressive 90-foot wingspan in the script of Dragonslayer, is a Relic of the old age. One of the last Dragons. The gargantuan monstruosity is kept quiet with a constant sacrifice of virgins, who are selected through a lottery. As later revealed in the film, the creature is also raising its newborn offspring.

Many of Barwood and Robbins’s precedent, unproduced screenplays also featured fantasy and science-fiction elements in their stories, also due to the authors’ long-time interest in those two genres. Work on the script began in the same year. In order to keep expenses reasonable (the final budget amounted to about 18 million dollars), “we designed it so that the Dragon would be in the movie as little as possible and yet be satisfying; and we always felt it would be safer to keep the creature in the dark, so you didn’t see the wires and the hooks and the levers and the matte lines. So the Dragon was always appearing in dimly lit circumstances. Even in the final battle the level of light was low because of the eclipse, which was brought on purely to help the special effects: ‘uh, get the lights down! He’s coming back!’”

During the progression of Dragonslayer‘s script, Barwood and Robbins decided to hire very early a creature designer, in order to aid the presentation of the project. Their choice fell on David Bunnett, a fantasy illustrator with no precedent experiences in film designing. The artist had previously collaborated with Janet Robbins — Matthew’s wife — in illustrating a weekly fantasy story, which featured a Dragon. Bunnett was at first reluctant in becoming involved in the production of a motion picture, but eventually accepted the offer. His illustrations provided an original direction to follow for the design of Vermithrax. Additionally, he aided the two writers with the storyboarding of the script. Paramount finally bought and financed Dragonslayer, but not before a long and intensive persuasion on the two writers’ part.

The ‘flying’ Vermithrax rod puppet, composited into a shot of the climatic battle.

Despite the supernatural context of the film and Vermithrax’s bond with it, Barwood and Robbins were adamant in bringing to the screen a creature that would be actually and concretely believable. Barwood stated: “it’s a beast with magical origins, but nevertheless we always thought that it ought to obey the various rules of evolutionary biology. As a vertebrate animal, it only gets to have four limbs, you know — so there’s no four feet and then wings on the back; the front feet have to also be the wings.”

The creative minds found their inspirations in prehistoric life. Specifically, a genre of Pterosaurs of the Jurassic period, Rhamphorhynchus, inspired the filmmakers. Barwood continues: “the basic model is a flying reptile called the Rhamphorhynchus. If you’re into Pterosaurs, you know that there are some that had no tails at all and instead had long back legs that extended outward to create tension on the wing membranes. Rhamphorhynchus, on the other hand, had a very long tail with a sort of spatulate piece at the very back, like a leaf, which was the stabilizer. That was the basic anatomical plan, although [the Dragon] in its details it does not resemble a Rhamphorhynchus at all. David did it so we could have a Dragon which could look magnificent when it was flying, and was strange and horrible when it was clumping around in its cave.”

Saint George and the Dragon, by Paolo Uccello.

Given DragonSlayer was set in the dark ages, an in-depth research was done on mythological Dragons of the medieval dark ages. In the end, it proved practically fruitless. Bunnett commented: “I did a lot of looking around at Dragon literature. It was interesting but ultimately basically useless stuff. I found that Dragons, as shown in the old pictures, were just plain goofy. Or else they would be very nicely done, but done by a sculptor or painter to fulfill the function needed by the art piece that was under way — basically a one-purpose Dragon. If the Dragon were shown in the air, for example, it would look very nice; but there would be no explanation of what this Dragon does when it’s not in the air. Or, if it were shown on the ground, it would be this amazing ferocious thing, and it would have little bitty bumblebee wings and bright butterfly colors. You just knew that that would never fly, ever.” Bunnett added in an interview with Weird Worlds: “Designing a Dragon isn’t just a matter of sticking wings on a Dinosaur. Vermithrax is 40 feet long, with a wingspan of 90 feet. But she had to look light enough to fly. So most of her weight is at the head, neck, and shoulders. The rest of her is pretty streamlined.”

Considerable time was spent in elaborating the appearence of Vermithrax’s head — due to its importance in the characterization of the Monster. Bunnett said: “that’s really where the personality is expressed to a great degree, and that was a tough one. We went round and round on that, and we seemed to alternate between too plain, nothing-going-on-here, and ridiculous rococo [late baroque] ornaments flopping all over the place. But one saturday afternoon, as I was watching football on TV with my little sketchpad on my knee, suddenly I just came up with an idea which was the solution to the Dragon. It was the bony ridge over the eyes, sort of sweeping back over the temples and becoming the horns. That turned out to be the motif that made everything else work.” Regarding the mouth of the creature, nature once again proved influential; Rattlesnakes were used as a reference when designing Vermithrax’s jaws. “I came to realize that you had to construct the jaw similar to a snake’s jaw. If you have a simple hinge with one pivot point, it just looks like a duck. What has to happen is it has to first of all develop some height at the back of the mouth, and secondly the lower jaw has to move back. Otherwise, it just won’t have it.”

A test shot of Chris Walas’ puppet Vermithrax head. One of the saviours of the production.

Vermithrax’s legs were, instead, actually based on a common chicken’s foot. Phil Tippett had sent to the writers. Barwood mentioned: “it was a big beast, but it had to be able to fly. So it needed to be very lightweight, like a bird — which wouldn’t be that unusual since reptiles are sort of related to birds, through the dinosaurs. Phil went out and got a chicken foot and we made a model of it and blew that up. So that’s literally the Dragon’s foot — a gigantic chicken foot.”

Industrial Light & Magic finally took on the duty to bring the fearsome Dragon to the screen, during the ‘pause’ between the productions of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Robbins was very pleased for the availability of the company. He said: “the first requirement was that if we did do a movie about a Dragon that we deliver a Dragon.We were very, very committed to the idea that it would not all be people staring past the lens reacting to something over your shoulder — that eventually we would run up against it. And I think that had it not been for our association with ILM, we never would have underaken it. It’s too terrifying to think of spending all this time on a movie and then coming up with a rubber duckie that’s going to flap and squawk. We knew about ILM’s operation so that we thought we could protect ourselves from some of the worst problems that would afflict a special effects movie, especially a special effects movie that would not command the biggest budget in the world.”

Important effects artists joined the project in fall 1979, including Brian Johnson (who had precedently worked on The Empire Strikes Back and Alien). The ILM crew unit was under the supervision of Dennis Muren, and included Phil Tippett and Ken Ralston as “the key Dragon effects people.” Many crewmembers spent time on both Dragonslayer and Raiders of the Lost Ark, another film produced in the same time.

Once the Dragon design was approved, David Bunnett — with no precedent experiences in sculpting — created a small scale maquette in clay and sent it to Industrial Light & Magic. Phil Tippett designed the final Vermithrax based on this prototype. “Dave’s design was more of a direction,” said Chris Walas, one of the key members of the special effects crew. “It was really Phil that refined and defined the final design.” Tippett mentioned some criteria involved in the refinement: “my whole objective was to take their basic notion of a long-necked, long-tailed quadruped, and make it serviceable as a stop-motion puppet. And I did that mainly by making necessary aesthetic changes in musculature, relation of body parts, and overall scale consistency that a real 40-foot animal would have.”

Shots of the original David Bunnett maquette.

Robbins commented on Phil’s involvement with the design: “Dave Bunnett was not a trained sculptor, so the Dragon he produced, while very good, was really more on the order of a sketch. Phil Tippett resisted our original concept at first, because he thought it would be too difficult to animate; but once he accepted it, it was really he who turned it into a finished piece of art. His Dragon was perfectly textured, with just the right surface detail and scale size and everything. And he did a lot of work on the head. The head itself was compressed laterally so it was taller and longer, and the eyebrow ridges had just the right articulation. You could still look at it and say, ‘yes, that’s Dave Bunnett’s Dragon,’ but there were a lot of subtle refinements. In one stroke, Phil had solved the overall personality of the head and given it a sort of noble quality to go with its nasty disposition.”

Certain aspects of the final Vermithrax design were dictated by the scale of the animation models and how they were to be manipulated. The creature’s musculature was fundamentally smoothed out. “One feature of the original design,” Bunnett said, “which is different from the final one is that the original was much more gaunt and ragged. But when you have to have a model that moves, you have to limit yourself; because if you have a design that exposes the musculature to a substantial degree, it’ll look fine when it’s stable, but when you see it moving you’re going to expect to see those muscles do things.”

The wings also underwent a cosmetic change, going from a more reptilian to a more bat-influenced appearence. Bunnett continues: “the wings look like bat wings magnified ten thousand times; and it’s a good look — in fact, I think it’s excellent. But initially, I wanted to have a wing which was a little bit more reptilian. In my mind it would be a leathery expanse that would have cartilage sort of struts or something. But the people who had to manipulate it on camera felt that that was too difficult, and by going to a bat wing type [of] design they had the obvious advantage of stiff fingery things they could stretch a membrane between. So you have to keep in mind the difference between design and art. In design there are sort of irreducible problems that have to be dealt with.”

In addition, the ILM crew also designed Vermithrax’s color scheme, which made the creature blend in its own environment. Tippett recalled: “the issue of the Dragon’s color wasn’t really addressed until I got to England. Amidst a hectic shooting schedule and hiring puppeteers for Ken and Jon to work with, I was lucky to pull Matt away from the set for a minute or two to confer on what colors should be used to integrate the Dragon into the cave sets. I felt it was important to make the Dragon look as though it was part of its world; so I would walk to the stages, pick up handfuls of slate and rock, and then go back to the painting area and derive some similar colors.” Vermithrax’s movements were largely based on 16mm footage of lizards.

Paramount struck a co-production deal with Walt Disney Productions. Dragonslayer, in fact, surprised audiences at the time of its release. Few people expected such a dark tone from a film co-signed by Disney. Full-scale models of the Dragon were built by Disney’s special effects company — headed by Danny Lee (who had worked on the Herbie films). Tippett’s final Dragon maquette was shipped to the Disney shop — where construction of the full-size models began. ”They have a fantastic facility there, with a mill, and a mold shop and a metal-working shop,” Barwood said to Fangoria. “They’d had long practice building dinosaurs for the various Disney parks, so they were fully prepared for the job.”

Brian Johnson checks the full size Vermithrax head.

Phil Tippett, Dave Carson and Jon Berg supervised the sculpting process, in order to mantain a complete likeness to the maquette design. A series of models in full size was fabricated. The construction was enormously complex, and Danny Lee himself was at first uncertain about it. A 16-foot head and neck section of Vermithrax was built, featuring full neck, head, mouth and eye movement. It was followed by a 30-foot wing section (including only the arm, without the fingers and the membrane between them), the left leg (complete with a grasping clawed foot), a 20-foot tail section (able to perform rough serpentine movements), and a full model of the burned carcass of the Monster — shown at the end of the film. The wing section was ultimately only used as part of this last model. The first four models were operated mainly with a crane. In all of those, Vermithrax’s reptilian skin was moulded in urethane. Danny Lee’s team also made an additional set of spare skins.

Once in England, Tippett supervised the painting process of the full size props to match the color scheme of the small-scale puppets and maquettes. The full size models were first filmed in the set of the exterior of the Dragon’s lair, which was built in the massive ’007′ stage of Pinewood. It was an elevated set (over 10 feet over the floor), allowing earthquake-causing mechanisms and space for the Dragon’s head to rise from the ground. In the interior of the cave, the infamous ‘burning water’ was achieved with flammable gas. It was simply emitted underwater, and once in contact with a burning source, it reacted with the peculiar effect shown in the film.

The full scale Vermithrax head in the Lake of Fire set.

Filming the full size models in the cave interior proved to be particularly complex. 13 people operated the full-scale head for the scene where the Dragon rises from the lake, dripping water and opening its jaws. The single shot needed days to be achieved. A considerable number of planned shots met difficulty in practical performance, due to the props’ limitations. Robbins commented: “there were many occasions where months of planning and storyboarding were thrown out in a matter of moments when we’d discover that the hoses weren’t long enough to reach the part of the set where we want to shoot; or the pump was going to break and take three days to fix; or a joint would smash when we dropped the claw and it wouldn’t grab anymore. When you’re in production, you can’t stop. You must shoot something and you must shoot it right now, or you’ll never get it. So the level of frustration was extremely high.”

This considerable loss of production time was resolved by transferring much of the setups for full size Dragon shots to the second unit — directed by Peter MacDonald. Robbins would just have to discuss the setup with MacDonald, and come to direct when a specific sequence was ready to be shot. At this point, Robbins realized that many planned shots did not require the advanced movements the first full size head could provide. Using the additional skins previously made by Lee’s team, a new full size head — simpler and lighter in its structure — was finally built; it was labeled as the ‘B’ head. Its weight was of 150 pounds, and it was rigged on a teeterboard that enabled upward and downward motion. It also featured simplified mechanisms allowing slight lateral movements. The ‘B’ head proved very useful and was used in a good number of shots, including the sequences where the Dragon rises behind Galen — before he turns around — and the demise of Brother Jacopus.

Galen attacks Vermithrax with his spear, Sicarius Dracorum (the name is a goof, as the second term should be Draconum; the latin name is Draco, Draconis). Peter MacNicol commented on the experience: “As Galen, I was supposed to jump on its back and drive a lance into its neck. To get the dragon moving, they started up the hydraulics — and the machinery went crazy. Vermithrax acted like a dog attacking a shoe, with me playing the shoe. I fell off and landed on my own lance. It was supposed to be an unbendable alloy — but I bent it!”

Early footage of the full-scale head did not make the filmmakers enthusiastic. In contrast with its frightful appearence, its movements were inadequate. According to Dennis Muren, this was due to who operated the enormous puppet. He said: “the guys that worked the dragonettes, the babies, were experienced in performing with puppets and projecting their thoughts into those puppets. But the guys that were trying to work the big Dragon were laborers, not puppeteers. Also, I think maybe it could have worked better than it did, if they had put some guys on it to work the bugs out. As it was, it just got rolled onto the set and was expected to work the first day — to act the first day, not just work.”

It is at this point that Chris Walas re-proposed an idea that was quickly disposed of in pre-production: a small scale hand puppet. Concern of additional matte lines and intercutting issues made Matthew Robbins prefer the full size head that could be effectively directed on set. Said concerns were now less pressing, and Walas insisted on the idea — supported by Muren. with the approval of the director, Walas went on to sculpt and build this ‘close-up’ head puppet, which was shot entirely at ILM. This new creation, although with most of its functions left unseen in the final film, proved formidable, and most importantly indispensable. It was used in most shots of the head of Vermithrax — including the sequence where the Dragon nuzzles its dead baby.

Chris Walas’ Vermithrax hand puppet.

The hand puppet could perform all the movements of the full scale head — with additional and more subtle motion. Basic movements were provided by a pistol-grip control mechanism installed inside the head. Other functions were supplied with cable-operated mechanisms, puppeteered externally by assistants — who used levers constructed by engineer Stuart Ziff. A motorcycle control handle on each lever enabled the performance of two specific functions at the same time. Chris Walas commented on the expressivity of the puppet, saying that “most of the functions were not originally designed into the Dragon. It was a reptile and reptiles don’t have a lot of facial mobility. So it was very difficult just deciding what to make move and to get it to move convincingly. It had the brows raising and lowering, the eyes moving back and forth, the eyelids opening and closing. The nostrils open and close. it snarls — they sort of insisted on ‘snarls’ — very innatural move. The temples pulse. The tongue swells in the throat.”

Chris Walas and his Vermithrax hand puppet.

Chris Walas was generally aided by three assistants, though certain shots required up to a total of six puppeteers. The hand puppet was mainly shot live against miniature cave sets, with the sequences themselves set up and photographed by Rick Fichter — who had already collaborated with the live-action unit. He was chosen to mantain visual continuity between the new shots and the sequences that had been produced already. The hand puppet head was shot in slow motion, with shots ranging from 32 and 48 frames per second. This technique infused an actual sense of mass into the movements of the creature, but actually proved to be rather complex. Walas said: “we carefully went over what it was going to do in each shot, and it was very difficult because we wound up having to do it in half the time or three-quarters of the time it was actually supposed to take. So what we finally wound up doing was going over it in real-time, and then counting it off as we went — which tended to work pretty well.”

Walas’ favourite shot of the creature in the entire film is when Vermithrax’s head snakes towards the camera, with darkness behind — suggesting the presence of the rest of the creature. During that shot, Walas stood behind the hand puppet, draped in black. It was his favourite due to the display of movement of his creation. He commented on the ‘unusual’ liberty of this shot, saying “that’s what I thought the puppet should have a lot more of — just a lot of movement. But part of the problem was that most of the close-up shots, or a fair amount of them, had to match flame shots. So we didn’t have a lot of leeway for movement.”

Despite all the issues the crew met with the full size models, the most complex challenge for Dragonslayer would be model animation. ”We knew the dragon had a lot more importance to this film than some of the incidental things that appeared in only a few shots in Star Wars or The Empire Strikes Back,” Johnson said. “The dragon had to be presented in a way that the audience would be absolutely stunned.” Since the beginning, Barwood and Robbins were convinced that the technique that should be used was dimensional animation. The ILM crew was at first uncertain in finding a way to convert the design into a convincing small scale animation puppet. Tippett said: “the design was so peculiar that it was very difficult to touch — especially the way the wings folded and covered up a lot of the body. As a practical stop-motion puppet it was a very difficult hands-on sort of thing. That was one of the first reasons we started thinking we’d have to come up with another way of articulating this thing. And we figured that there must be a way of adapting motion control equipment that was available at this facility to plug into a pretty standard stop-motion puppet.”

“One of the things I’d thought of,” Muren recalled, “was trying to do it with muppets, where you have a rod puppet sort of thing — shot bluescreen but done live. That wouldn’t have worked either because you would have had five guys trying to make this thing look alive. They never could have synched up.” This technique would be experimented with a decade later, by Boss films (who would coin the label ‘Mo-Motion’) to animate the Dog Alien rod puppet in Alien³. The ILM crew, however, quickly abandoned the idea of animating the Dragon with such procedure.

Stuart Ziff eventually found out what would become the basis of the technique — the Dragon would indeed be a rod puppet. “It was obvious that the puppet was just too small to put any motors inside [of it]. Not knowing exactly how we wanted it to move, we came up with the idea that whatever it would be would connect externally. Since the Dragon would usually be photographed so it was dark, we would conceal rods coming up to the feet.” Ziff set to work on a motion control mechanism for the miniature Dragon model. Tippett explained the intention behind finding a new technique: “what we all wanted was to break away from the stereotypical stop-motion look, which is not only an artifact of a succession of still photographs, but a simplified geometry in the blocking out of the shots that some animators are forced to do.”

The ‘walking’ Vermithrax rod puppet on set, rigged up in Ziff’s motion control system.

In six months’ time, Ziff elaborated an innovative motion control mechanism to animate the fearsome Vermithrax. No one among the crew at the time knew what the result of this new motion control technique would look like. The crew was entirely ready for its failure, and prepared to fall back onto stop-motion animation. Barwood commented on the situation, saying that “we had to spend months constructing the Dragon mover, and we had to spend more months learning to use it. We were all chewing our nails by the time we started getting our first walker shots [January 1981]. Eventually, though, we added some, because it became obvious that they were great.”

The motion control mechanism consisted of several ‘units’ — each of which was composed of a rod system. They were attached to a central part that would coordinate their movements. Each unit was driven by three stepper motors — which, combined with a series of mechanisms, allowed the unit and its rod to move in all three dimensions. Six units controlled the Dragon’s movements: one for each limb, one for the Dragon’s body and one for its head and neck. This entire system was installed onto a motion control cart, which was in turn put onto a 8-feet track. There was a total of 19 stop-motion motors, 16 of which could be under motion control at any given time. When applied to this system, the Dragon model would be effectively suspended in midair while performing its movements.

Phil Tippett sets the ‘walking’ Vermithrax model up for filming.

Ziff enabled the motion control system to be dismantled and reconfigured in a wide array of dispositions — depending on what movements a specific shot would require. The understructure of the Dragon puppet, a metallic armature, featured threaded holes to connect to the puppeteering rods. In turn, said rods were attached to the motion units via a combination of other rods and clamps.This expedient provided additional flexibility, and prevented the rods from colliding with each other while puppeteering the model. The motion control system was able to move the Dragon in real-time speeds, even though the crew never needed such a function (Ziff simply wanted the most available options as possible).

Using the knowledge acquired by Jon Berg and Doug Beswick during the production of The Empire Strikes Back, Tom St. Amand built the armatures. Hinges and swivels enabled Phil Tippett to lock off certain axes of movement. “If the Dragon had to walk in a straight line,” St. Amand said, “obviously you wouldn’t want the legs to go cattywampus out. So with these you could lock off the joints which would make the legs do that.” Each joint was based on a simple axis swivel type of movement, barring the neck and tail — which were segmented with ball-and-socket joints.

The ‘walking’ Vermithrax armature.

Two 3-feet long armatures for the ‘walking’ Dragon were actually made, in the possibility of needing both working at the same time. Ultimately, the second armature served only the purpose of a prototype for animation and skin covering tests. Two 4-inch puppets of Galen were also built for the shots that portrayed the Dragon and the Warrior both onscreen. Chris Walas preliminarily sculpted the walking Dragon, with finishing touches by Phil Tippett; after moulding by the former, the latter would then finalize the fabrication.

The very first plan was to animate the head and neck conventionally — using stop-motion — whereas the rest of the body would use the new technique. This first approach was due to the fact the Dragon was to be filmed in David Carson’s miniature sets. Dennis Muren explained: “we couldn’t figure out how to motorize the neck and head without doing everything bluescreen, and we didn’t want to do everything bluescreen. So the first shot Phil tried was when the mother walks out and looks at the baby Dragon. Doing everything he could to focus attention on the head and neck — which is the only part that was just stop-motion — it still showed up as looking different from the rest of the puppet. In fact, it was perhaps more objectionable than if the whole puppet had been stop-motion. And this was the full miniature set, with scrims in there for smoke and all sorts of stuff. It was so complicated that we figured: ‘what’s the point of doing every shot like this when it’s a compromise. What we want to do is motorize that head.’ That was when the decision was made to motorize the head and shoot the stuff bluescreen.’”

A shot of the ‘walking’ Dragon crew. From left to right: Gary Leo, Ray Gilberti, Bess Wiley, Stuart Ziff, Phil Tippett, Dennis Muren, Dave Carson and Mike McAlister.

As a result, almost all of the 20 walking Dragon shots  were realized with bluescreen. Once finalized, this new process obviously acquired a new name. “I wanted ‘animotion’,” Ziff recalled, “so we could call the animators ‘animotors’. But that one didn’t float at all.” Eventually, this new animation technique began to be called ‘Go-Motion‘.

Carson lamented the process of building miniature sets that would have been better on a different scale — had he known from the beginning that bluescreen would be used. Before it was decided to use bluescreen, Carson had built suspended sets. “It was impossible to actually construct a miniature cave,” he said. “It had to be done in layers of facades. And unfortunately, we found in the first couple of shots that it looked like layers of facades.” He added: “that’s where the real problem came — trying to get everything in such a small area. Then it turned out that we ended up bluescreening the Dragon in most of the shots. Had we known we were going to take that approach initially, I could have built the sets at a different scale.”

This eased the process of hiding the animating rods, which consisted in either masking them or rotoscoping them with articulate mattes. Generally, only the Dragon’s head needed the latter technique. Sometimes the rods could even be hidden by shadows or even anatomical details of the Dragon itself. Setting up the shots proved to be particularly complex. The first step was determining the basic configuration of the mover mechanism. Following was the construction of the attaching rod systems. In any case, the configuration had to prevent the rods to obstacle the Dragon’s movements or pass in front of its body.

Once the mover was configured with the Dragon installed in it, and the shot was aligned, the next step was to set up the tension of the Dragon’s joints. This enabled said joints to respond appropriately to the rod movements. The 16 memory tracks were then built singlehandledly. “It was complicated,” Ziff said, “because each foot could go up and down, and back and forth, and right and left, but when you had to go in a circular motion — you could only program one track at a time — it was like working an Etch-A-Sketch with one hand and trying to get it to look circular. That was sort of difficult, but Phil mastered it.”

Vermithrax test shots.

For a foot or limb to appear to stop whilst the Dragon was moving forward (and thus the rest of the body was continuing to move), the unit controlling the foot would have to be programmed to move backward contemporaneously as the rest moved forward. Such programming was far more complex than those done for the Star Wars spaceships — which had only one control unit. Tippett essentially learned about programming while filming Dragonslayer. The more complex shots of the ‘walking’ Dragon would take up to 1-2, to even 2 and a half weeks to program. Actual shooting instead took up to one hour. Tippett said: “By the time we got most of the very complicated shots out of the way — which took about 2 months — we were able to finish up the final third of the shots in about 2 and a half weeks because we’d gotten so familiar with the system.”

Even with additional animation, once a shot was programmed, filming would proceed smoothly. “One of the major attributes of the walking Dragon setups,” Tippett said, “was, since these rods were plugged into all the various members, there wasn’t much necessity to gauge things with surface gauges. It was all pre-gauged and locked down. That really helped the continuity and the flow of the animation.”

One of the ‘walking’ shots was widely modified. Barwood recalled how Robbins wanted to change it: “Phil had programmed the Dragon to come through the cave after the babies are discovered to be dead. And he had him coming through the cave with his head kind of turning from side to side. I think what Phil had in mind was that that was a natural part of its gait, but the effect on screen was that it was paying no attention — like it was just kind of out for a romp in the cave — when really what’s going on in its tiny little Dragon mind is: ‘I’m gonna get the sucker who killed my babies!’ It needed to have its face coming right toward you, full of menace. Well, Matthew got a chance to see that played back on video and say, ‘wait a minute. Let’s change that.’ And Phil did. But the rest of the move was still there in the computer memory and could be retained and put into the shot.”

Ken Ralston was assigned to the more or less 40 shots where the Dragon would actually fly. 2 additional ‘flying’ Dragon go-motion puppets were made, with an aluminium skeleton that enabled a wide range of motion. They were maneuvered using the spaceship-type motion control techniques used for Star Wars. Those ‘flying’ models were slightly smaller in scale than their ‘walking’ counterpart, and were made with ball-and-socket armatures. The larger model featured a gearbox mechanism that enabled its wings to actually flap during flight. This moved only the forearms, and as such it would still be necessary to animate the wing tips by hand.

In construction phase, Tippett attaches the wing membranes to one of the ‘flying’ Vermithrax models (the ‘flapping’ one, specifically’).

Ironically enough, Robbins did not want considerable wing movement. Ralston recalled: “the first flying Dragon I shot was not at all the way it ended up in the film. It was a slower, more serpentine thing; and there was much more flapping.” As it turned out, Robbins really wanted a Master of the air. He explained: “we hadn’t really had a chance to estabilish a working relationship with Ken and Phil, and the ideas as to the personality of the Dragon were not really in hand. There was a shot of the Dragon where I felt it was flapping its wings too much. Ken really thought it was believable, but I just had to decide what I wanted to go with. The shot was, technically, as good as anything that was ever done; but in terms of the dramatic feel of the creature, I wanted something very different. I wanted it to move with very little wing movement. The more it had to flap to stay airborne, the more it sort of seemed to be struggling. Flapping just did not seem to be in tune with its regal nature, and so we dropped that idea from many of the shots.”

The Dragon also had to fly rather fast. “We know it’s going too fast,” Robbins said. “We did some math, and it’s doing around a hundred and fifty miles an hour most of the time. But we make no apology for that fact. believe me, when it seems to be going the right speed, it looks altogether too languorous and relaxed to be able to generate the intensity you need at the end of the movie.”

One of the most spectacular shots features the Dragon hovering whilst breathing fire on Ulrich, during the climax of the film. “They had shot a plate of Ulrich,” Ralston said. “Then they shot a flame pass with the set all dark. And the flame was moving up and down — it wasn’t just locked off — so I had to match the flame with the head. That was my favourite shot.”

One of the ‘flying’ Vermithrax models was also featured in the only stop-motion sequence of the film — a long shot of the Dragon on a rock mountain hide, writhing its wings and glaring down at the protagonists, just before the final battle. Production pressures prevented the ‘walking’ puppet to be used there, so Ralston simply animated one of the ‘flying’ Dragons.

Dennis Muren checks one of the ‘flying’ Dragons before filming.

Tom St. Amand eventually joined the animation process and actually animated the last ‘flying’ shots at night, after Ralston had set them up during the day. Most of the flying shots were ultimately and relatively easy to film; it was not the case, however, for the shots of the Dragon falling out of the sky, covered in smoke. On stage, a descending smoke bomb (by pyrotechnician Thaine Morris) was filmed. Ralston’s task here was to match the Dragon’s movement to the smoke’s. The movement was then repeated via motion control, and a small light attached to the Dragon provided a ‘glowing’ chest — adding visual validity to the Dragon as the source of the smoke. Further embers detaching and flying off of the Dragon were added to the shot by Loring Doyle.

A custom back-it fluorescent bluescreen was used for the final battle, both for the creature and actors. “It was a very complex sequence,” Muren said. “Not many films end with ten minutes of bluescreen actors in front of created backgrounds.” The background eventually ended up to be a dark sky with ‘boiling clouds’. The background plates for the cloud formations were filmed in Hawaii.

Despite the long learning process for it, the fundamental advantage of go-motion is that it allows the puppet to move during the exposure of a frame. This means a significant addition of motion blur which looks more natural and organic than conventional stop-motion animation. In addition, according to Barwood, go-motion “allows the animator to store his ideas, the way you’d write them down if you were writing a script.” Robbins had unprecedented control over the animation. Tippett explained, saying that “if the director saw the puppet was moving too slowly, he could say, ‘well, I want it to go faster.’ You’d shoot yourself if he told you that after you spent two days doing conventional animation. But this way, we just entered another value and could speed it up by almost any percentage he wanted.” Carson added: “the director was able to treat the effects shots the same way he treated the live-action. That caused us a lot of headaches and a lot of grumbling, but it’s the way most directors like to work.”

Vermithrax unleashes its fiery breath (pictured: Walas’ hand puppet).

Vermithrax’s fiery breath was achieved with two flame throwers designed and built by Brian Johnson. Both used a gas under high pressure, laced with lycopodium powder; this caused the brightness and particular color of the flames. The first, cannon-sized flame thrower was swivel-mounted; it was used in the wide shot in the Lake of Fire, and in the confrontation with Ulrich. Previously, an internal incendiary system was installed inside the full size Dragon head, and although successfully tested, it proved unsatisfying on the actual stage. As a result, the fire was shot separately and optically composited with the Dragon when it unleashes its fiery attack. Fire was composited with practically all versions of the Dragon. The second flame thrower, smaller, was used for closer shots where the reach of the larger one was not required.

Sam Comstock supervised the compositing process. He was dissatisfied with some of the results, saying that “there was a little trouble on some of them with teeth. What looks like a matte line isn’t really. It’s the shadow of the part of the tooth that wasn’t illuminated, and that’s just the way it had to be lit. It doesn’t really light up the way a bunch of flame inside his mouth would light up. So there wasn’t a whole lot we could do about that. If you have a tooth that’s lit from one side, it’s going to be dark on one side. It would be too fastidious — even for us, I think — to try to animate in illumination for each tooth.”

When Valerian bravely enters the Dragon’s lair to collect shed scales, she is attacked by one of Vermithrax’s progeny. The baby Dragons were designed by Ken Ralston. David Bunnett, again, started the designing process; he tried to find a physical appearence that would not inspire sympathy. This fundamental guideline was due to the fact Galen was to brutally slay the creatures. Bunnett commented on the designing process, saying that “the essential problem with the babies was that the baby of any species is cute and adorable.” Some designs were finalized but discarded. Bunnett commented: “we had one that looked like an eagle chick — tiny little flappy wings. You couldn’t even use it on Saturday morning television it was so cute.” Bunnett identified in the large eyes a key design element to achieve empathy from the audience, and decided that the Dragonettes should have relatively small eyes. Ken Ralston then designed the final appearence, infusing “a lot of bulldog and bat in the face.” He also included details that would later grow and develop in the adult stage: a rudimentary horn on the snout, a small tail, and long arms with still undeveloped membrane.

The three babies were created as full-sized puppets by Ken Ralston, Chris Walas and David Carson, in addition to the single, featureless miniature model used for the scene where Vermithrax realizes its progeny is dead. One of them was to be decapitated, and featured separated head and body parts that could be easily cut apart. Once on set, the full-sized Dragonettes were operated from beneath, through holes in the floor of the cave set. The puppeteers were provided with monitors that allowed them to watch the movements of their puppets. The puppeteers had to stand to the fake blood and KY jelly (used to make the creatures’ skin glisten) dripping through the holes.

Ralston lamented a controversial scheduling choice, which put the slaughter scene before the sequence where Valerian discovers one of the babies. One of the puppets, intended to use for the latter scene, featured a mechanism that enabled its eyes to blink; said feature was destroyed, however, during filming of the former. Ralston recalled the unfortunate event: “one of the dumber things that happened, but just the way it happens in film — Dave Carson had rigged this thing so the eyes would blink; we had balloons all over to swell things on him and move all over the place. So what do they schedule first? The scene where Galen is tearing these creatures to pieces in the cave. The eye blink isn’t in the show at all because one of the first shots was Galen hitting this thing with the torch — which wasn’t planned — and he hit it square on top of the head, which broke the mechanism. I remember sitting under there getting my hand beat to pieces and looking at the video after he had done it. The eyes were just hanging out; the mechanisms, springs, everything was destroyed; the balloons in the throat had broken. He was even burnt, because of the torch. Then I had like three weeks for the earlier shots where Valerian goes down into the cavern and sees them.”

As a closing word, what Matthew Robbins really wanted was the Monster to be the center piece of Dragonslayer. “I’d always conceived of Vermithrax as being the center of the drama,” he said. “In other words, he was my star. And insofar as I was able to do it, I wanted to be able to walk out on his set, pull his big head down and whisper in his ear: ‘don’t look so far right. Don’t be so close to the boy. Remember, you’re not angry; tou’re just very cold.’ Or: ‘Now you’re angry’. In other words, I was directing, from my point of view, the lead actor.”

“There are very few landmarks created for me. One of the best and one of the strongest landmarks that almost nobody can overcome is Dragonslayer. The design of the Vermithrax Pejorative is perhaps one of the most perfect creature designs ever made.”
-Guillermo del Toro

For more images of Vermithrax and its progeny, visit the Monster Gallery.

Promotional artwork.

In the decades following the cinematic appearence of Vermithrax Pejorative, few films — among which DragonHeart — brought Dragons once more to the screen. In early 1996, writing duo Gregg Chabot and Kevin Peterka combined the majestic creatures with a post-apocalyptic scenario. Although this first draft would later evolve upon acquisition by Spyglass pictures, the core concept remained the same: what fundamentally breathed life into Reign of Fire was the desire to create the ultimate cinematic Dragons. Fast, lethal — and first of all unbelievably real Monsters. “There was [an] agreement between Roger Birnbaum, my producer, and me,” said Rob Bowman, director of the film, “that ‘let’s not set up to do this if we don’t make a new benchmark for Dragons’, and I was gonna make sure they were going to be as realistic as I could make them.” The duty to give life to about 130 shots of the fire-breathing Reptiles was given to The Secret Lab, Disney’s in-house visual effects company — which was unfortunately disbanded shortly after production of Reign of Fire was completed.

The original script proved to be too expensive to be brought to the screen, and as such underwent major modifications during pre-production — some of which even during production. This was due to a threatened writer’s strike, which not only shortened the pre-production phase, but also significantly affected the creature design process. Instead of the usual progression from conceptual designs, to maquettes, to finished models, the design team approached the designs on all three fronts contemporaneously. “We didn’t have enough time for the classic pipeline,” said Richard Hoover, one of the visual effects supervisors of The Secret Lab. “so we went at everything at the same time. Rob brought in outside storyboard artists — Matt Codd was the lead artist for that group, doing a lot of conceptual art and design work — as well as some physical sculptors, under Miles Teves, who were working in clay, just sculpting ideas. Simultaneously, we had our own digital sculptors and 3D modelers working on designs and building the digital model, with Mike Meaker and Allen Battino from our art department producing extensive concept art. It was a creative workshop where everyone looked at what everyone else was doing — the modelers looked at what the 3D sculptors were doing, the 3D sculptors looked at what the artists were doing, and it went around and around until we finally got something Rob was happy with. Because we had to go to CG right away, we debated whether it was really necessary to do physical models; but I felt that having something tactile that everyone could see and touch, from executives on down to the artists, was important. In the end, once the physical sculpture was approved, we scanned that in and manipulated our CG models to match.” This unusual and rather intensive designing process lasted a total of 9 months, encompassing the whole pre-production and 2 months of production.

Early concept art by Mike Meaker.

Designing the terrifying beasts of legends was resumed as “basically building an animal” by Bowman. “We had to determine the look, the physics, the physiology, the anatomy, the personality of the Dragons — plus all the infinitesimal design aspects,” he said. “I was very specific about what I wanted; and the result was that we came up with a Dragon that was unlike anything from any other movie.” Miles Teves, probably in reference to the four-limbed archetype that was used, instead claimed that “we were trying to do a modern take on the dragon ‘Vermithrax’ from the 1981 film DragonSlayer, which is one of the best dragon designs of all time. However, Vermithrax had the body of a snake with tiny little chicken legs, and our Dragons needed to be more robust.”

A rather in-depth research on mythological Dragons in various cultures was the very beginning of the design process. “When I took this movie on,” the director recalled in a featurette, “I began [a] research about what Dragons meant to different countries, and I was surprised to see the number of countries that had their own Dragon lore and mythology.” Richard R. Hoover, one of the visual effects supervisors, added: “we did a lot of homework on the mythology and all the renderings of Dragons that have been done. We looked at hundreds of comic books, chinese and historical mythological drawings. A lot of them had humanistic [humanoid] qualities, but Rob wanted to stay away from that.”

Concept art of a Dragon walking by Mike Meaker.

Bowman’s intention was “to make the Dragons like real animals that could exist on earth,” according to Dan DeLeeuw, one of the visual effects supervisors — the ‘creature specialist’ amongst the crew. The Monsters had to evoke the feeling of a real species and that had actually evolved through natural selection. “Basically, they are at the top of the food chain now,” DeLeeuw said, “and there’s nothing humans can do against them. Everything about them is a weapon. They’re fighters — lean and very strong, with very little body fat. They’re the perfect predators.” The Dragons had to be “absolutely insane”, yet infused with a realistic vibe in their appearence. “We tried to make them as vicious and organic as we possibly could,” Bowman said. Given that, it was obvious that nature would provide the most inspiration for the Dragon design. Various modern — as well as extinct — animal species were used as reference when it came to estabilish the Dragons’ overall anatomy, ranging from the skeletal structure to the textures of the skin. A paleontologist was even called for consulence, given the creatures’ mysterious prehistoric origin — but the designers did not want them to overly resemble other mesozoic reptiles. “One of Rob’s goals was that the Dragon [would have to] look reptilian,” DeLeeuw said, “but we didn’t want it to look like a Dinosaur. So when the early designs came back with big strong jaws, like a T.Rex, we went back and slimmed those down and make them look more snaky.” Early digital tests also featured a longer neck and reptilian traits — such as a snake-like outgoing tongue — which were later discarded from the Dragon design.

One of the final maquettes, sculpted by Miles Teves and Bill Basso — and painted by Jordu Schell.

The overall anatomy was derived mostly from reptiles and bats. Particular attention was given to the wings, a key feature of the Dragons. DeLeeuw said: “The front legs are part of the wings and if we made the wings too big, the Dragon couldn’t walk. The wing size and legs had to be worked out so that the Dragon did not walk like a gorilla.” The basic structure derived from bats, with a long bone at the wrist extending back, with the fingers coming further down the arm. When on the ground, the fingers supporting the membrane fold back, creating scalloped edges and a silhouette ideal for back lighting. Various species of crocodiles, lizards and snakes were used as reference for both the skeletal structure and the scales of the Dragons. Advanced digital muscle systems composed an understructure that enabled the animators to focus on the actual performance whilst still achieving subtle and realistic muscular motion. This also applied to the digital skin, which would stretch and contract realistically when the model moved. The effects team wanted to avoid a leathery appearence for the creatures’ skin; due to that reason, they had to find a technique that would replace displacement maps. John Murrah, digital effects supervisor, said to Cinefex that “Dan didn’t want displacement maps for the scales. In case we had close-up shots, he wanted to see the scales move realistically, riding on top of one another, with just the skin between them stretching and not the scales themselves.”

The Secret Lab solved this issue by re-engineering a hair renderer program, precedently used for  102 Dalmatians, in order for it to render scales instead of fur. CG supervisor Adolph Lusinsky said that “it was Hank Driskill’s idea to change the fur system we had developed for 102 Dalmatians in order to grow the scales. The first test was to grow scales on some dog animation we had. It looked like corn-on-the-cob, but it told us we were on the right track. At first we were going to make the skin like a snake’s; but snake scales are shiny — which made the Dragon look like a plastic toy — and the herringbone pattern blew the Dragon’s scale. So next, we rented Crocodile and Alligator pelts and photographed different scales. For example, those that went along the arm, where the animal needed to bend, tended to be mmore pebbly than the armored scales on the back. We actually took a lot of those references and put them right onto our Dragon.” Ultimately, the surface of the Dragons’ skin was covered with thousands of individual digital scales, able to overlap and interact realistically. In addition, displacement maps were also used for additional detailing in certain parts of the body, including some regions of the head. A custom shader was used in order for the scales to mantain their shape when the skin would stretch.

The un-textured Bull Dragon model…

…and the final incarnation of the creature, complete with crocodilian and snake-like scales.

As a final touch added to the finished textured models, some of the Dragons’ character and history were suggested via scars and tears in the vast wing membranes. “I theorized that the Dragons were always battling each other,” DeLeeuw said, “or the forces trying to eliminate them. So when we designed and painted the texture maps for the wings we added bite marks and made a bunch of holes to represent machine gun strafes. Once we got through with the damage on the wings, we went back in and made the Dragon look as mean as we possibly could. And the more scarred and damaged it was, the meaner it looked. We suggested the Dragon’s history through its scars.”

Different digital models with subtle differences were created to portray the Dragon society. The female Dragons were conceived as 160 feet long and with a 240-foot wingspan. The Bull male, the first Dragon awakened in an ancient underground cave, is instead 180 feet long and with an enormous wingspan of 320 feet.

A maquette for the Bull male, sculpted by Miles Teves.

The ‘patriarch’ also displays more intimidating traits: its head features longer horns, and pronounced cobra-like crests can be seen on either side of its neck. This ‘hood’ can be contracted into a menacing position when the creature is about to strike. The gargantuan monstruosity was originally envisioned in early drafts of the film as a ‘Queen’ female, nicknamed ‘Ashley’ in the first script version. Although no sources directly state this, it is possible that the writers realized that a reverse hierarchy would result in a greater number of Dragons in less time (which would justify the enormous number of them surfacing in such little time), and thus discarded the Queen — in favor of a King.

The Dragons’ most lethal feature is, of course, their destructive flame breath. In-keeping with the idea of making the monstrous creatures as life-like as possible, two different animal species were ‘combined’ to create the flame breath. Director Rob Bowman posed the question early, and found inspiration in spitting Cobras. He said: “watching National Geographic, they were showing this Cobra spitting, and I said, ‘that’s it, that’s how we’ll do it.’ It’ll be glands that squirt out opposite chemicals — and when the two touch, there’s flame!”

The flame breath was also inspired by the bombardier beetles, small carabid coleopters of various tribes. Their peculiar defense mechanism involves the ejection from their abdomen of two different chemicals (hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide). The two substances in order react and produce a hot noxious spray, which can be lethal for attacking insects. This was the actual base for the Dragons’ breath, as explained by DeLeeuw: “our art director, Mike Meaker, had seen an african beetle with a similar defense mechanism. It sprayed a chemical out its rear and made sparks to ignite the stream. So our idea was that there are two glands at the back of the Dragon’s throat, producing chemicals. The Dragon spits out the liquids with muscles constricting the glands. When the two streams cross 15 or 20 feet in front of the Dragon they naturally combust.” Before actually spitting fire, the Dragons pull back and shake their head — then thrust forward violently. This behaviour was once again based on spitting Cobras.

The fire was created as a digital insertion in most of the shots, but certain sequences recurred to enormous flamethrowers — able to produce a fire stream up to 110 feet of length. “It was based on two three — or four — fire hose nozzles” Hoover said, “that were spaced exactly the width of the Dragon’s head and mounted on a huge tractor. Dave forzed the propane out at some phenomenal pressure and ignited it. The flame would shoot over 100 feet, and it was so hot that no one could stand closer than 100 or 150 feet. On one occasion it burned the insulation off the electrical cable buried a foot deep in the mud. I think Rob was always afraid we were going to hurt somebody.” The digital fire was instead created with The Secret Lab’s fluid dynamics engine, with the practical fire on set used as reference. DeLeeuw explained: “our animators would animate the two cones at the sides of the Dragon’s mouth to aim the fire. Then they would give it to our effects people and they would do the calculation for our CFD engine. With CFD, we were able to get a lot of realistic movement that you wouldn’t be able to get with just a normal dynamics model.” He added: “we looked at how the fire evolved, from when it first ignites and burns really hot to when it cools off, and we put that same thing into our fire renderer. So our fire actually transitions through stages, from very, very hot to starting to cool off, getting more detail in it until it eventually turns to smoke. Then we switch over from the fire shader to the smoke shader. We built all of that intelligence into the shader, trying to make it look real.”

The chemicals in the Dragons’ mouth glands sometimes leak out, causing a literal ‘flaming drool’. DeLeeuw commented: “we also wondered what would happen if, whenever the Dragon got ready to breathe fire, it drooled from either side of its mouth like a dog. As this fluorescent blue fluid drips together, it sparks and burns as a cool blue flame. So, we had the Dragons actually drooling fire.” The saliva was achieved with a combustible blue liquid, flowing from a remote-controlled device conceived by John Gray of Reelistic FX — who also contributed to the practical fire. These practical elements were shot separately and then tracked onto the digital Dragon, creating the fiery slavering effect.

One of the female Dragons ‘drools fire’ in a scene from the film.

No less effort was put into estabilishing how the Dragons would actually move – airborne or on the ground. The process began whilst the script was not yet in its final stage, according to DeLeeuw: “while the script was still being changed we would create animatics, small animations of what the Dragon could do. We did flap cycles, diving, animation tests of the tail being used as a mace, we explored how the Dragon breathes fire, how he holds his body and throws his neck forward. We created a lot of different pieces — and ended up with a kind of bible for the Dragon characters.”

When in flight, the Dragons’ movement and behaviour was based on that of predatory birds. “Those were best for determining how the Dragon should land,” Hoover said, “how they should attack something from the air, how they should fly out, those kinds of things.” When flying, “we decided that everything would hang from the shoulders, like a hornet,” said CG supervisor Eamonn Butler. Hawks and eagles were once again used as the base of the actual wing movement.

Footage of crocodiles, iguanas, komodo Dragons and other reptiles, as well as lions, tigers and leopards, was used as reference for the ground movement. Hoover explained: “Once a Dragon was on the ground, it became much more reptilian in its behaviour, which was just more wicked looking. Rob’s sound design guy had recorded a cobra in a trash can striking at the microphone; and once we heard that, it gave us ideas about what the mouth and neck and head attitute should be, and we carried that behaviour through the body.” Once again, the Dragons also had not to remind the audience of Dinosaurs, according to DeLeeuw: “the first animations we did were very ‘dinosaury’ — big and lumbering, with too much of a T.Rex step pounding the feet into the ground. Then I got a tape of Komodo Dragons and looked at how they moved. It was much more snaky, slithering on the ground; so we started thinking about that, and finally hit on a solution after looking at a couple of nature tapes of big cats hunting. In those tapes was a shot of a leopard slinking through the tall grass in a really cool pose where the shoulders came up high, and the legs were going forward and back, very much in line with the body — very feline. When we incorporated that with a snaky movement in the Dragon’s long neck, the combination was something no one had ever seen before — but the separate movements resonated as familiar-looking.”

DeLeeuw also mentioned a connection with vultures to Animation World: “we gave the Dragon’s long neck a vulture pose where we draped it down low and he hangs his head.” DeLeeuw also explained in a Cinefex article how the wing structure affected the ground movement animation: “it wasn’t like animating a dog or a cat, where you just have four legs. The Dragon’s back legs were just there to help hold up the hips, while its weight was really supported on the wings. The arms were a combination of arms and wings; so as the creature moved around, we’d have another 140 or 160 feet of wing hanging off the wrist.” A dynamic wing membrane system was conceived by creature supervisor Rob Dressel and integrated into the existing digital skin and muscle system. This expedient freed the animators from having to animate manually every single wing dynamic, and enabled them to focus on the larger wing movements. During renderings, this system would create detailed movement within the membrane — stretching or fluttering. Dressel explained to Cinefex: “if the fingers were far apart or close together, we could make that membrane as tight or as droopy as we wanted. Once we got the software working, we saw really subtle movement that just blew away what anyone could do by hand. It was also art-directable, so you could set the material style as far as how it bounced and jiggled. Those and other controls made the Dragon the most complex animation rig I’ve ever worked on.”

Curiously enough, the effects team was also inspired by a classic cinematic vampire. “One day,” said Meaker, “he [Bowman] said: ‘just think of it as Bela Lugosi.’ He got down on all fours and started crawling on his forearms, putting his hands in front of his face. From that we made a walk cycle where the Dragon draws its arms and wings across its body, giving it a shrouded, mysterious look.” This posture also managed to ‘conceal’ the legs of the Dragon, which were the last ‘finalized’ design aspect. During flight they would strictly adhere to the underside of the Dragon’s body. Complex techniques were used to believably composite the digital Dragon models into sequences, with them even interacting with atmospheric elements — such as the smoke moved by the Bull male’s wings when it lands on Quinn’s fortress.

To show the Bull male’s injuries after the explosion caused by Van Zan, new surface maps were used to depict seared scales and damaged tissue. Hoover commented on the references, saying that “to get ideas, we looked at photos of burn victims from medical journals and all kinds of gross stuff. Then one day, I said: ‘you know, I come from Washington state where we used to buy half a cow for the family. Let’s just go buy one of those and burn it — and we’ll film it.’ I wanted a cow with skin on it so we could see what the skin would look like burnt; but U.S. department of Agriculture won’t let you buy a cow with skin on it — it’s not healthy. So we went to a grocery store and bought some beef, sliced it thin and put it on glass; and I had John Gray burn it in all different kinds of ways. First we put crisco oil on the glass; then we put the meat on that, and cooked it. All the edges of the meat started curling and getting black and crispy, and the oil started going red and bloody. It was beautiful!” This process was filmed and used as reference for the new texture maps, painted by Mark Siegel. They were then augmented with digital smoke and animated with the CFD engine to waft realistically during the Dragon’s flight.

Though the Dragons were brought to the screen with computer generated imagery for most of the film, a full-size model was built to portray the fallen Dragon, slain by Van Zan in the second act of the film. Construction of the massive prop was commissioned to Artem, a special effects house of London. It was the biggest project ever given to them. To ensure that the model would precisely replicate the digital Dragons, “we scanned the maquette and generated cut-through slice data so that we could make accurate polystyrene forms,” said Christ Martin, supervisor of the construction process. “Then we took back an inch of area that was going to be rubber, and put clay all over the forms to get a better final surface for molding. We made a multipiece fiberglass mold and used two-part rubber backed up with strong fabric because it was such a heavy thing. We used emulsion-type paints, some mixed with latex depending on where we were applying them. The wing was semi-translucent in places; so for almost all of that we used wood stain. The teeth were made out of acrylic so you could see through them and have a kind of x-factor.”

Sculpted in about 10 weeks, the model portrayed the whole body of the beast, with the exception of its left wing and its tail — which were digitally added to the practical Dragon in post-production. The full-size Monster was designed to fold up for convenient transport — which eased the duty of moving it from West London to the set in southern Ireland. Since the Dragon is not quite dead after falling to its ruin, puppeteers within the body articulated the mouth from within, making it slaver, and added subtle tongue and gland motion. Pneumatics installed in the torso, instead, simulated the Monster’s last breaths. In a later scene, Quinn extracts an egg from the carcass; the model was created in clear polyurethane with a latex Dragon embryo inside. “For the scene where Christian cuts through and removes the egg, we used the rig like a defibrillator, so the Dragon reacted with kind of a wobble,” Martin said. He also recalled: “after we got it up, the director took a stroll around it. It was a tense moment, because he hadn’t seen it since it was half-made, but he said, ‘you’ve hit a home run’, and that was very encouraging. It was shot over a couple of days in smoky, wittish conditions. We dribbled artificial blood on the Dragon, so it was like an abattoir inside it — and we had seats in there where our crew controlled the pneumatics. They had to pass the egg into Christian’s hands because it was covered in slime and he couldn’t get a grip on it.” The model was dismantled and scattered around location for another — deleted — sequence, where Quinn sees up close the remains of a female Dragon killed by the Bull male.

Hoover commented overall on the project, in the light of it being The Secret Lab’s last project: “after doing this for so many years, I believe that if you feel a picture is going to be really difficult, then you have a better chance of doing something really special. And in this movie, I think we succeeded far beyond what I’d imagined.”

For more images of the Dragons, visit the Monster Gallery.

Special thanks to Niklas Ericsson for providing the Cinefex #91 scans.

Main Articles:

• Troll in the Dungeon
  
• Fluffy
• Norbert
• Firenze

All at once there was a scraping noise and the egg split open. The baby dragon flopped on to the table. It wasn’t exactly pretty; Harry thought it looked like a crumpled, black umbrella. Its spiny wings were huge compared to its skinny jet body and it had a long snout with wide nostrils, stubs of horns and bulging, orange eyes.

It sneezed. A couple of sparks flew out of its snout.

‘Isn’t he beautiful?’ Hagrid murmured. He reached out a hand to stroke the dragon’s head. It snapped at his fingers, showing pointed fangs.

‘Bless him, look, he knows his mummy!’ said Hagrid.
-J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

In designing Norbert for the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Paul Catling tried to steer close to the description of the creature, particularly emphasizing the proportions of its head, legs and wings compared to its body, and the size of its eyes in regards to the head; Catling focused in giving the character “awkward gawkiness.” As the creature is a baby, the filmmakers resolved that the eponymous ‘ridgeback’ wouldn’t be developed yet. Creative licenses included the colour scheme, more varied than the simple black of the novel version. After a final design was selected, Catling sculpted it into a maquette, which was used as reference for the digital model. Richard Hollander and his team at Rhythms & Hues modeled the creature digitally from scratch. Wrinkly skin and muscle simulations were devised by Mark Rodahl and Will Telford.

Norbert was endowed with subtle iridescence on his back and other details. “He had a bony little rib cage,” Hollander said, “and some nice iridescence on his back, little chicken feet, wet and leathery bat wings, a body like a lizard. We gave him double lids on his eyes, a set of horns on the back of his head, a little pointy tongue, a nice tail that he could swish, and a very bendy neck.”

On set, John Richardson puppeteered a large prop egg by directing air jets from underneath the table. In the hatching shot, the egg is replaced by a digital counterpart, which cracks open with a small gaseous explosion. Hollander commented: “you first see one arm burst out of the egg shell, then he climbs out, bery wobbly, staggers, slips on a piece of eggshell, begins to sniffle, then sneezes, producing a fireball that singes Hagrid’s beard. Chris Columbus wanted us to play the scene like when a little kid pees and people think it’s cute. Norbert is very sweet and innocent, even though he’s a dragon, and Hagrid just loves him.”

The animation process was supervised by Craig Talmy, and performed in Voodoo. Houdini and Vmantra were used by Pauline Ts’o to light and render the dragon; the elements were then composed in Icey by Harry Lam.

For more pictures of Norbert, visit the Monster Gallery.

And there was the Horntail, at the other end of the enclosure, crouched low over her clutch of eggs, her wings half-furled, her evil, yellow eyes upon him, a monstrous, scaly, black lizard, thrashing her spiked tail, heaving yard-long gouge marks in the hard ground.

-J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Designing the Hungarian Horntail for the film adaptation of Goblet of Fire proved to be an arduous challenge: given the long tradition of dragon depictions in both films and general media, the creature designers focused on what not to do in order to distinguish the Horntail (as well as the other First Task dragons) from previous dragon designs. The creature effects team set out to portray a spectacular and surprising creature.

Concept art by Paul Catling.

“The biggest challenge is to make them not look like what anyone else has done,” said Nick Dudman. “So when you’re doing dragons, werewolves, anything that’s iconic you hit a problem because a lot of the good ideas have already been done, so you have to find a different angle.” Several concept artists — including Wayne Barlowe, Adam Brockbank, and Paul Catling — sketched most diverse iterations of the character. Early concepts included bird-like and shark-like variations.

Rowling’s description in the novel made mention of “clawed front legs,” a trait that was initially considered, but discarded; in order to maintain artistic integrity, the filmmakers eventually steered towards a four-limbed configuration of the anatomy, harkening back to Norbert from the first film. The key trait of the creature — the ‘horntail’ — was initially envisioned as a scorpion’s stinger, or a tail tip with clusters or rows of spikes. In the end, a large spear-like tail tip covered in smaller spikes was chosen. As the design process progressed, it was decided to make horns the key visual motif of the monster — endowing it with a crown of horns on its head, which continued mane-like down its neck, back and tail, ending in the spiked tip. Some of the horns on the creature’s head can also flare out and hinge back to highlight its emotional state. The final design — penned by Paul Catling — was also strongly influenced by birds of prey: a hawk-like beaked tip of the mouth and a proportionally large chest housing powerful flight muscles completed the imposing look of the Hungarian Horntail.

Based on the approved design, Kate Hill sculpted two quarter-scale Horntail maquettes, which were moulded in fiberglass and painted for reference. A larger scanning model was then devised and supplied to Industrial Light & Magic to create the digital model of the dragon.

Kate Hill’s Horntail maquette.

The maquettes also served as reference for a full-scale Horntail animatronic built by Nick Dudman’s special effects team. The puppet would be used in the early shots that revealed the creature, which show it in a distance. Dudman recalled: “the production wanted a lightweight life-size dragon head to run about on set with. Once we had that head and eight feet of the neck, we suggested that we could sculpt the rest very quickly, keeping it very basic. We used that for wide shots of the dragon in its cage.” Kate Hill led the creation of the full-size sculpture of the Horntail — aided by Waldo Mason, Andy Hunt and other sculptors.

Animatronic systems supervisor Matt Denton mounted the creature’s head to a computer-controlled performance system that was devised cannibalizing parts of Aragog and the Basilisk built for the second film, in order to save both time and budget. The skull of the dragon was fabricated in fireproof fiberlass with a steel beak, epoxy teeth and silicone skin. For a dragon that could actually breathe fire, the mouth interior was lined with flame retardant Nomex. The entire head was coated inside and out with Flamebar, a flexible fire-resistant elastomeric silicone sealant. John Richardson and his mechanical effects team fitted the mouth with twin flame jets using a benturi system that blasted liquid propane over a pilot flame. The Horntail animatronic could shoot a 36-foot stream of dragonfire at the camera.

The skin of the creature was painted by Kate Hill and Waldo Mason. The thorns on the Dragon’s head, neck and back were moulded in coloured resin, and were of six different sizes; a total of 200-300 (including ‘backup’ thorns) were made. The larger spikes were reinforced with fiberglass matting. Each thorn was individually hand-finished, and painted once put in place on the Dragon.

The finished full-size Horntail.

The finished animatronic was mounted on a mobile, wheeled unit — which eased transport of the enormous prop. The head could perform a wide range of motion, including an articulated neck and mouth, and movable eyes, eyelids and nostrils. The wings could make limited movements and the body could move from side to side. The puppet was shot inside a hydraulically-operated breakaway cage. In addition, the full-size Horntail was also used at the film’s world premiere in London.

Oh, don’t worry about ’em, Harry, they’re seriously misunderstood creatures… although, I have to admit that Horntail is a right nasty piece of work.

Since the beginning, it was intended to bring the Horntail to life mostly through computer animation. The task was assigned to Industrial Light & Magic, whose digital effects artists fashioned a Horntail model starting from the maquette provided by Dudman’s team. The digital model was used for the remainder of the forest sequence, as well as the entire first task scene. A small-scale version of the Horntail also appears in the selection scene.

Texture artist lead Terry Molatore oversaw model painting and endowed the creature with a colour scheme that closely matched the maquette and the puppet — with specular sheen, translucency, and detail in the membranous wings. Character rigging supervisor Eric Wong devised an animation rig that allowed spreading and folding of the wings, with dynamic interactions for membrane billowing effects. Development of the final appearance of the dragon and the sequence’s array of visual effects was supervised by Robert Weaver.

Development of the Horntail’s body language was assigned to animation director Steve Rollins, who collaborated with visual effects supervisor Jim Mitchell. Much like the design itself, the animation mainly referenced birds of prey — such as eagles and owls. “When you see the movie, look for the head twitching, head cocked, and quick twitchy movements; these were all from the bird references,” said visual effects supervisor Tim Alexander. Other minor references included reptiles and bats. Different iterations of the animation sequences were attempted before a final version was selected by the director. “Where the dragon crawls across the rocks, we’d do one version with it using its hind legs, another where it’s crouched down, using the batlike hands on its wings to crawl,” Alexander explained.

Crafting the dragonfire was another challenge. “Fire is a natural occurrence, everyone knows what it looks like. They know if it looks fake,” Alexander said. “We needed fire to be directable, and that took a long time.” Many of the dragonfire shots were a combination of the digital Horntail and practical fire elements provided by John Richardson’s team — who built a handheld flamethrower device that blasted flames across rocks in the first task arena set. For the chase scene, the fire was portrayed with composited practical flame elements shot by physical effects supervisor Geoff Heron, as well as digital fire simulations created in ILM’s Zeno pipeline. Said system made use of Stanford University’s ‘PhysBAM’ physics simulations. “Stanford’s smoke simulations created roiling and spinning particles,” said Alexander. “It was similar to the live-action pyro elements, so we used that as the basis for our CG fire. Smoke tends to move slower than fire, so we did a lot of work with speed and scale — too fast, and it spurted everywhere; too slow, and it didn’t create the roiling effect. We then developed a shader look with very sharp detail broken up at the ridges.”

In the novel, the first task ends in the arena; in the film, however, the sequence was taken into a more action-oriented direction: the Horntail breaks from its restraints, chasing Harry outside the arena. Visual effects supervisor Jim Mitchell developed the idea. He related: “There never was any of the chase around Hogwarts castle, but one day when I was checking out the huge physical model of the castle for some establishing shots, I thought how cool would it be see Harry and the dragon flying through its deep ravines, under bridges and past these giant, stoned structures. I imagined the dragon landing on one of the steep towers and roaring like King Kong on the Empire State Building.  Mike Newell and the producers liked the idea and so the sequence grew to include the chase.  I think it opened the sequence up and made it more perilous and exciting than it originally was.” The chase scene offered the opportunity to further showcase Horntail animation — swooping like a hawk or crawling like a bat on the Hogwarts towers.

Colliding into a bridge, the Horntail falls into an uncertain fate, whereas its miniature counterpart makes a cameo in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince — roasting chestnuts on a cart outside Weasley Wizard Wheezes. Jim Mitchell was satisfied with the final results of the Horntail animation and rendering for Goblet of Fire, saying that “ILM did a great job with the animation and look of the bat-like dragon making it as real as any dragon I’ve seen.”

For more pictures of the Hungarian Horntail, visit the Monster Gallery.