Behind the dragon by One of Us in ‘Damsel’. A new excerpt from befores & afters magazine.
In Netflix’s Damsel, from director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, a young woman, Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown), finds herself thrown into a cave with a fearsome flying and fire-breathing dragon (voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo).
Working with production visual effects supervisors Nigel Denton-Howes and Nicholas Brooks, One of Us crafted 166 dragon creature shots for the film, often with fully digital cave environments and DMP set extensions.
Here, One of Us head of animation Catherine Mullan and animation supervisor Brett Margules break down the different components that went into the dragon, starting with concept designs, looking to cat and bird references, exploring motion tests, dealing with lipsync, and making the dragon breathe fire.
It starts with the design
With a complex creature like a dragon, One of Us had to start somewhere. And that was with concept design by production designer Patrick Tatopoulos. “He did this brilliant concept art of the dragon, and a little representation of the damsel,” says Margules. “I knew straight away from seeing that, that this was not a ‘dragon’. This was something very, very unique. It was not walking on its wings like a dragon. It was a quadruped.”
“She had this very sphinx-like design to her,” continues Margules. “There was almost an Egyptian-like aesthetic when you looked at her from different angles. So she wasn’t that generic long, elongated neck, walking around on her wings. There was also something in that design which was her demeanor, her attitude. She was supposed to be very methodical, and very cunning.”
Mullan recalls, in the same vein as a sphinx, that the dragon was described as being like a cat. “There was a lot of material we could pull from in regards to cats and from big birds. Obviously the scale of her was completely different, but there was a multitude of real-life reference that was a starting point for that.”
Another aspect to the dragon, which led early discussions, was about how she would fly. “They wanted her to be a master of flight,” recounts Margules.
“Generally dragons are big and clumsy, and the bigger they get, the clumsier they are. They crash into things. But our dragon was never allowed to look flippy or wobbly. She was always in perfect control of her own actions. They were very adamant about her ability to navigate flawlessly through her environment, but to also interact with it. She was to latch onto the pillars, and search for things. And then she could fly, and dive off, and give chase, and then negotiate between very tight pillars. It was all just supposed to be very slick and flawless, not clumsy and flapping about.”
The dragon features an extraordinary long tail, something that One of Us also had to make early consideration for. “There were many discussions around it being like a weapon and how she uses it for distraction,” notes Mullan. “We were thinking about how a lot of it would feed into the story as well. How she used the tail and her boday dictated the story, the shots, all of it.”
“This tail almost became its own character to a very, very, very already complex character,” states Margules. “She could either be calmly waving it like a cat, or there were moments where she’s grimacing, and you’d see it flip about. Beyond everything else on the motion, it actually became part of her performance to give an indication to her annoyance or calmness.”
Motion tests to final performance
Using the first version of their CG model of the dragon, Margules embarked on a series of poses that replicated Tatopoulos’ own concept poses. This was a fast way of generating a three-dimensional turntable, including the incorporation of a digi-double to stand in for the character Elodie to help determine scale relationships.
The next step for Margules was story poses. “Here we had different attitudes and demeanors. One was where she was very proud and regal. And then where she was stalking, and one where she was hunting. Another variation where she was very low to the ground, which we used when Elodie has the sword at the dragon’s eye. If you went through the final film, each one of those poses more or less made it into the film in some fashion.”
Margules says these story poses, which included eyeline measurements, also helped give production an idea of how they would shoot on set, especially in terms of working out scale and height.
Walk cycles were further part of early development of the dragon. They included flying and stopping cycles, notes Mullan, “which were really great to see what she does with her wings, how she holds her wings while she’s in motion and on the ground. She’s got four legs, but you also then have these huge wings that need to go somewhere and do something. There were a lot of things to figure out in that respect.”
“Also, in terms of informing the shoot,” continues Mullan, “if she is in this stalking pose, she’s so huge, but what distance is she actually walking? She’s so big that a step for her makes her travel a fair way, so we had to work out how slow would she have to be performing in order to not bring her all the way across the cave system and in front of Elodie too quickly?”
On set, actors such as Millie Bobby Brown generally performed against various representations of the dragon. These on set elements would be painted out by One of Us and replaced with its CG dragon. One stand-in was a blue foam stuffy of the dragon’s head on a pole. Another was a telescopic boom pole featuring an array of LEDs. Even the classic tennis ball on a stick came into play.
“This was used for interactions, where the dragon’s claw would touch Elodie’s face, or when she pushed Lord Bayford (Ray Winstone),” says Margules. “There’s a point where the dragon slaps him to the ground quite ferociously. There was also one prop, which was called the elephant’s foot, which had two guys in blue leotards holding a big elephant foot stump, with a big pad at the bottom of it. That was used for shots of the dragon pushing or holding Elodie Millie down so that Millie could seem to struggle and have some physical resistance.”
The final animation was handled in Maya. This proved to be a significant project for One of Us, which has in recent years been ramping up its creature animation capabilities. “We underwent a lot of development in our creature pipeline, in rigging and CFX techniques and workflow,” observes Mullan. “Damsel was our most ambitious project in terms of creature animation and it gave us the opportunity to evolve in these areas.”
“And,” says Margules, “in this new technological climate, where you’re seeing a lot of motion capture or facial capture systems and things like that, I personally take a great deal of pride in noting that everything was handcrafted. Everything was hand animated on Damsel.”
Meanwhile, the One of Us CFX (character effects) team worked hand-in-hand with animation to add many of the dragon’s extra nuanced behaviors, such as muscle jiggle and plate movement, mainly in Houdini. Indeed, as Margules describes, that kind of secondary animation became highly evolved on the film.
“Initially, we were doing things within animation where, if she crashes, we were adding a jiggle to the puppet. But this was actually significantly pulled back once the muscle system became more robust and more developed, because that was actually having negative effects for their simulation. We were forcing the puppet to do something that the muscle system would easily accommodate of its own volition. In the end, anything on an anatomical level, such as the tail or anything that had a skeletal system in it, that very much came from animation performance, but all those beautiful subtleties of muscles jiggles and secondary motion were done in CFX.”
Read the full article issue #18 of befores & afters magazine.
