First-time director and former ILM vet Stefen Fangmeier made the design of Saphira a priority. The result is a dragon that doesn't look like any other in movie history. Photo credit: ILM. All images ™& © 2006 Twentieth Century Fox.

&atypeDragon movies have never been a filmgoer's favorite. From Dragonslayer to Dragonheart to Dungeons & Dragons, this genre has always disappointed studios and producers alike. With Eragon (opening Dec. 15), Twentieth Century Fox is hoping to do to dragon movies what Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean did to the pirate movie genre. The studio is betting that the source material, a worldwide best-selling novel by Christopher Paolini, will be popular enough to lure moviegoers into theaters.

Helming the epic production was first-time director Stefen Fangmeier, a former visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic. "There were multiple challenges for me, as it was a dragon movie, and a period movie, and it featured large-scale battle scenes, and the lead actor had never done a movie before. My priority was to design Saphira, the dragon. I worked with the design team at ILM over a period of about six months, testing various approaches. We finally created a shape that we were all happy with, a strong dragon with a very powerful head and feminine blue eyes. At this point, the wings were bat-like, but when we showed the concept to the studio, they said that they really liked the wings of Angel in X-Men: The Last Stand, which they were producing at the time, and could our dragon have feathered wings? So, we revamped the concept to incorporate scaly wings, which took the whole design away from reptilians. In the end, it was a good thing as our dragon doesn't look like any other dragon in movie history."

At ILM, visual effects supervisor Samir Hoon was initially assigned the whole project, but when the vfx shot count increased dramatically during post-production, Weta Digital, Cinesite, CIS Hollywood and other vendors were brought in. Michael McAlister joined the production as overall visual effects supervisor to coordinate the global effort. ILM ended up producing about 215 shots, all of them featuring the dragon. The team there included vfx producers Gretchen Libby and Jeff Olson, animation supervisor Glen McIntosh and digital production supervisor Michael DiComo.

At one point in the design phase, Saphira's wings were bat-like, but the studio, inspired by the wings of Angel in X-Men: The Last Stand, requested feathered wings. ILM revamped the concept to incorporate scaly wings. Photo credit: ILM.

Conveying Emotions
Although ILM had just created a dragon for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the challenge of creating Saphira was of a completely different nature. 'To start with, the dragon in Harry Potter was bipedal, while Saphira was a four-legged character," Hoon says. "Plus, Saphira was a real character, not a mere creature. She had to communicate with Eragon telepathically, meaning that we had to convey all her emotions through facial animation only. She was basically delivering dialog without really talking. Also, we had to deal with a highly unusual skin color... " In the book, Saphira is described as a giant blue dragon, a nice concept on paper, but a tough one to translate on screen. "We worked on the skin color a lot, trying to keep it blue, but still tweaking it to make it believable," Fangmeier notes. "There is no large animal in real life that has a vibrant blue color. We had to find just the right skin color, a subtle hue that would allow Saphira to appear in scenes that were lit in warm tones and not stand out. It was a real challenge."

Saphira was modeled and animated in Maya. "We needed to have the detail of small overlapping scales over Saphira's surface that would have made the geometry too heavy if modeled," CG supervisor John Helms explains. "So, we used a combination of painted textures and shading to directionally displace scales from her surface, so that even the smallest scales overlapped. Her skin had subsurface scattering, and her eyes had the same type of work that would have been done on a digital human." The tricky part was finding a way for the wings to fold up in a pleasant manner. Some times, the geometry wouldn't fold up properly or the scales would end up creating messy intersections. "We did cheat a little bit, once in a while," Hoon smiles. "What you don't see doesn't hurt you, right? So, we just had a modeler go in and clean it up. When Saphira was flying, since she was not moving her wings a lot, we had simulations running on top of the wings and on the scaly feathers, just to keep them alive." A completely different model was built for the hatching sequence.

During principal photography, the crew used simple cutout shapes to represent the dragon and help the cameramen and actors to visualize the character. For shots in which a human character had to be seated on Saphira, the crew used the motion rig that had been built at Pinewood Studios, England, for the Hippogriff sequence in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. "We had extensive previsualization of all the flight scenes," Hoon adds. "We first animated the dragon and established the camera move in the computer. Then, on the bluescreen set, the dragon animation drove the motion rig, while the CG camera drove the motion control system. So, the actor followed every move that the CG dragon made, which allowed us to blend CG animation and live action very precisely. This technique was used for complicated shots in which Saphira and Eragon needed to be 'locked.' For simple flying shots, we animated a generic flight cycle that was used to drive the motion rig. The actor was then shot without motion control, which gave us more latitude to adjust the animation and compose the shot."