Designing Thimbletack and his transformation from meek house brownie into the boggart had to be violent, fast and angry.

And what about Thimbletack and his transformation into the boggart? “Basically, what happens is that you have this really nice little, meek house brownie, and, when you anger him, he gets horribly tempered and then transforms into this big, ugly, gray frog-like boggart. So, designing that transformation had to be violent and fast, but it had to look angry the way the transformation happened. Of course, going back from boggart to brownie, he’s slowing down and is a lot [gentler]. Actually, the boggart design was done at Tippett Studio, but we ended up, of course, having to create the model and paint it up. So, a lot of the skin textures were made of different things. We definitely got some frog in there, a fish belly because that was really nasty looking. And then, of course, we have the usual skin disease that we like to reference for all of our gross creatures. He’s got boils on him, and he’s pretty nasty. That’s always an interesting reference search: finding the nastiest, slimiest textures.”

And Alzmann reminds us that ILM did a lot of environmental design, too. “The whole Griffin flight, where Byron, the Griffin, takes the kids to the magical glade, we worked on the glade design, and we worked on these different environments that they fly through to get there. That was a lot of fun. Basically, what we roughly tried to communicate was that they flew through the four seasons and arrived in spring in this beautiful green glade.”

What about the Griffin, himself? Did Alzmann refer to nature at all as part of Byron’s design? “Byron is designed after a classical griffin being that he is half-eagle and half- lion. He has roughly a 25-foot wingspan, which had to visually appear like enough wingspan to carry three kids. We were able to visit an animal sanctuary and get plenty of useful video and a still reference of a red tail hawk. This is where Byron gets his ruddy brown plumage.”

Byron the Griffin is designed after a classical griffin. He takes the kids on a magical ride in which they fly through the four seasons and arrive in spring at this beautiful green glade (r). 

And what was the inspiration behind the design of the ride? “A lot of that concept work was done by me and our lead digital matte artist on the show, Brett Northcutt. We did a lot of the conceptual designs where the trick was how to look at these aerial environments as something that’s realistic yet a little bit magical. We wanted to get a little more magical with each new environment so that you knew they were leading somewhere special. And, in the end, we came up with the idea that since we were landing in springtime why don’t we have each of those four environments come up. I think we start in fall, and then we go into summer, and then winter and then the glade is spring. Normally what you end up doing in a film is you design one environment and then you’ve got 20 different views of that. But it was fun to conceptualize all those different ones. And all had to be pretty and magical with all the Maxfield Parrish that we could put in.”

J. Paul Peszko is a freelance writer and screenwriter living in Los Angeles. He writes various features and reviews, as well as short fiction. He has a feature comedy in development and has just completed his second novel. When he isn't writing, he teaches communications courses.