‘Beowulf’ breathes fire into a new kind of dragon

To build a better dragon -- that’s every visual effects pro’s dream, and nightmare.

Think about it. How does one improve upon Vermithrax, the 16th century fire-breather in 1981’s “Dragonslayer”? Or for that matter, Draco, the dazzling horned and winged pacifist in 1996’s “Dragonheart”?

Production designer Doug Chiang, an Oscar-winning Lucasfilm visual effects designer, knew he was walking into a genre crowded with the beasts when he was tasked with creating a whole new dragon for director Robert Zemeckis’ latest motion-capture epic, “Beowulf.”

Chiang headed up the CG design crew at ImageMovers, Zemeckis’ Northern California-based CG production studio.

“It’s a really tough challenge working in a world where so many dragons dominate the cinematic landscape,” Chiang said by telephone.

Tossing aside all notions of what a dragon is supposed to look like, he and his team went for realistic references, such as bats and the wings on flying squirrels. The dragon was also given a unique gait, gold body surfacing and a tail that allows propulsion through water because “Bob wanted a big underwater chase sequence,” Chiang said.

A pivotal scene in the third act has the story’s hero Beowulf, portrayed by Ray Winstone, confronting the dragon, who happens to be his son. The dragon features Winstone’s eyes, and its reptilian face carries over some of the actor’s bone structure.

“Bob always said it has to look like the coolest dragon we’ve ever seen,” Chiang said. “So we layered it with the details from [screenwriter] Neil Gaiman’s story, like gold skin tones. Bob has a strong image in his mind, he uses certain words repeatedly, then it’s just a matter of me getting in tune with him until we get there.”

-- Sheigh Crabtree