Building a Dragon From the Ground Up

When director Rob Bowman and an army of technical-effects wizards set out to create the definitive movie dragon for Touchstone Pictures and Spyglass Entertainment’s “Reign of Fire,” they took inspiration from a surprising source. Instead of relying on prior effects-based dragon films, such as “Dragonslayer” and “Dragonheart,” they turned to National Geographic TV specials.

“I’m presenting the idea that dragons are the supreme predator of all predators, so I wanted to look at great predators and see what characteristics they have,” Bowman says of his Boeing 747-sized, fire-spewing creature. “This is an Earth-born creature, not an alien, and I wanted the audience to look at these creatures and feel like, ‘I’ve seen that. Where have I seen that?’ ”

Set in a post-apocalyptic world that has been all but destroyed by the awakened dragons, “Reign of Fire” centers on a small group of human survivors in England who encounter a team of warrior dragon-hunters, fighting to reclaim the planet.

Bucking summer action-movie tradition, Bowman wanted to focus more on the human characters (led by Christian Bale, Matthew McConaughey and Polish actress Izabella Scorupco) than on digital effects. But he knew that even when used sparingly, the threat had to be absolutely realistic and convincing rather than the standard, thundering, Tyrannosaurus rex-type image. Bowman wanted a dragon that could conceivably exist and fly in the real world.

Consultations with a paleontologist confirmed that in order to fly gracefully with a minimum of flapping, the dragon would have to have an enormous wingspan--the equivalent of 320 feet--with the arms incorporated into the wings, and a very small, snakelike torso.

Artists and technicians at the Secret Lab, the digital shop owned by Touchstone’s parent, the Walt Disney Co. (which last fall phased it out, having decided to outsource effects work), worked for months on the design of the main dragon, which was nicknamed “Ashley” (Ash-ley, get it?), sculpting in clay, drawing on paper and even doing early computer sculpts and animation tests. “That allowed us to do many iterations very quickly,” notes co-visual effects supervisor Dan DeLeeuw.

For the director, though, there were almost too many. “They were very, very productive down there,” Bowman says, laughing. “A new drawing would come back and the attitude on its face would be, ‘I enjoy killing!’ It was too human. At one point, after a couple of months, I pounded my fist on the table and said, ‘Stop trying to impress me with these illustrations. It doesn’t look like something out of ‘National Geographic’; it looks like something out of a fantasy novel.’ The word I gave them was: ‘Don’t impress me, bore me.’ ”

The traditionally straight, almost swanlike neck from the earliest design was changed to a drooping neck and low-hanging head, which gave Ashley a more threatening look. Finally, a drawing by artist Mike Meaker, showing the dragon in what Bowman describes as a “Lamborghini profile where it’s lowest in front and sweeps high in the back,” gave the director what he wanted.

This approach carried through to the animation. “I got a bunch of nature documentaries, and there was one shot of a leopard stalking some gazelles through high grass, hunched down very low to the ground, its shoulder blades rising very high,” says DeLeeuw. “I took that piece of video to one of the animators and said, ‘I know this may be a little odd, because of how big this thing is, but try to make its movements as much like a cat as you can.’ When we had done that test, Rob had flipped over it, and that was that.”

Once the crouching-leopard, hiding-dragon version of Ashley was approved, it was built in the computer from the bones out with an eye toward nature, more or less. “The rib cage, backbone and sternum are from a bird, like a pelican,” says visual effects supervisor Rich Hoover. “Part of the neck is somewhat following a bird, and the tail is very reptilian, though there’s a little cheating from a pure bird’s bone structure and a lot of variation from a reptile.”

Bowman remained adamant throughout the animation that no human qualities creep into the look or expressions of the dragons.

“The expression on the face doesn’t change much,” he says. “It was important to be true to what we understand in wildlife. There’s no facial expression before or after a shark eats you, and a lion doesn’t really smile or frown. These things are built into the audience’s psyche and their memories, and therefore it’s more realistic.”

Taking a cue from his dog, the director realized that the dragons could express a range of emotions through the movements of their reptilian tails.

Adapting the procedural animation system (one that allows for the automatic animation of complex surfaces once the parameters have been input) that had been used by Disney for fur animation of the computer-generated dogs in “102 Dalmatians” and the lemurs in “Dinosaur,” the artists created individual scales on the dragon that would shift with the movement of the creature’s musculature. The membranous wings were made to resemble tattered curtains, the legacy of past battles.

In the context of the story, there is only one male dragon but hundreds of smaller, recently hatched females (intriguingly, the earliest version of the script had it the other way around). For the females, which are usually seen from a distance, through smoke or very quickly while in flight, one model was built and replicated and rescaled for each individual creature, using an adaptation of the animation package originally used to create the animal stampede in Disney’s “Mulan.”

“We took a piece of animation, say, flapping its wings for five seconds,” and repeated it, says Hoover. “We made five or six different kinds of animations--a flapping, a gliding, a flapping hard, a takeoff--and we were able to piecemeal all those together and go in and out of them whenever we wanted to make the flights subtly different.”

Thus, one shot of ruined London features dozens of female dragons in the skies, all of which were worked off one model.

It was yet another nature video, this one on king cobras, that gave Bowman the explanation for the most fantastical element of dragon mythology: the fiery breath.

In “Reign of Fire,” it isn’t breath but a combination of opposite chemicals shot from glands in each side of the dragon’s mouth that ignite when they touch. This was derived from watching the way a king cobra spits venom and knowledge of a particular African beetle that really does secrete combustible fluids as a defensive action.

As for the fire itself, the original plans called for it to be practical, shot out of a rig that special effects supervisor David Gauthier built with fire hoses mounted on an excavator arm, hooked up to a tanker truck of propane.

After the rig proved too unwieldy and dangerous, Hoover decided to digitally animate the fire as well.

“That gave us a lot more tools to give us the kind of look we wanted,” he says. “We could control the speed, the flame, the color and when it went from fire to smoke. It may be a little bit more fantastic than reality, but it’s a lot more fun to watch.”