Celebrate the 30th anniversary of Dragonheart with key members of the VFX team.
Released on 31 May, 1996, Rob Cohen’s Dragonheart capitalized on a revolution happening in visual effects filmmaking: the photoreal CG character, namely, Draco, voiced by Sean Connery. At the forefront of that kind of CG character work was (and arguably still is) Industrial Light & Magic, which by then had delivered digital dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and progressed into even more expressive characters in Casper and The Mask.
For the 25th anniversary of the film, befores & afters arranged a special VFX panel at VIEW Conference, featuring visual effects supervisor Scott Squires, dragon designer Phil Tippett and supervising character animator Rob Coleman. Squires and Tippett were Oscar nominees for Best Visual Effects for Dragonheart. Here is the fun, and often hilarious, transcript.
We discuss design and tech breakthroughs, the special Dragonheart dragon tests, on-set stories and even memories of the 1997 Academy Awards ceremony. Scott Squires has also provided a host of behind the scenes imagery for the story.
Note, you’ll read in this interview many references to character animation supervisor James Straus, who was also an Oscar nominee on the film. In addition to training crew members and directing animation, Straus helped ILM’s Cary Phillips design the Caricature Animation System, or CARI, which was used to animate the mouth and face of Draco. (Phillips who won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement for the system).
b&a: I wondered if everyone could weigh in a little about the state of play back in ’94, ’95, ’96, in terms of visual effects. Where were we at with doing these films with CG characters, using practical effects, making CG look real?
Scott Squires: Well, ILM had done Casper, so we had a character there. Jurassic Park had just happened a couple years earlier. It’s my understanding that the dragon that we ended up building, the number of vertexes within the head were more than the entire T-rex on Jurassic Park, and the number of minutes that we generated were more, and obviously the whole voice was a new thing with this creature.
So those were big breakthroughs. This script had been on the shelf for seven years because they said, ‘Okay, this is a great script, but we can’t make it until we can actually get a talking dragon.’
b&a: Phil, what about your perspective? Obviously the Jurassic Park thing had happened with the move from stop-motion to CG. What’s your memory of how things shaped up in the few years after that?
Phil Tippett: Well, then everything kind of went to Hell. ILM ended up doing Casper and I ended up doing Coneheads, so that was our repayment for Jurassic Park.
b&a: Okay. Rob, what about your perspective, especially perhaps where you were working or doing at the time?
Rob Coleman: I came into ILM in October of ’93. ILM had already released Jurassic Park in May and the computer graphics department was still pretty small at that point. In fact, I was animator number nine, there were six animators who worked on Jurassic. And I think the entire CG department during Jurassic was about 45 or 50 people. So there was a big growth in ILM through ’93 and ’94.
The studio was working on The Flintstones, The Mask and then Casper, and Casper was huge. I actually kept away from Casper. I was afraid I was going to get lost in the mix of all these animators because the team was getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And I went off to work on smaller films like Disclosure and Star Trek Generations. Then around that time also it was Jumanji.
[For Dragonheart], my early recollection was there was a test done by James Straus where they took the digital T-rex and I think they put wings on it and also made it talk. That was a huge leap for us in terms of character animation and creating an emoting character.
b&a: Phil, how did you get brought on to do dragon designs? You’ve obviously got a rich history with dragons prior to Dragonheart. How did that process begin in terms of designs for this film?
Phil Tippett: How it started was I was called down to visit [director] Rob Cohen and [producer] Raffaella De Laurentiis. I went down for a meeting and proposed what I wanted to do. Certain things were very important, like making sure that the face all around the mouth would be capable of delivering dialogue. And so I used the physiognomy of an ape, like a gorilla, as its basis.
And so from that, I pretty much knew we stood a chance to being able to get the lips to move in some kind of convincing way. Then I worked on some designs and the sculptor that I worked with Pete Konig, we came up with a bunch of … Oh, in that first meeting, I brought some art from some art history books and was showing it to Rob and Raffaella, and there were these two demons in there.
And I said, ‘Why is this a place to start?’ Why? Well, because I thought if we make the mouth the right shape and the way these are configured, they can use their hands. That was something I picked up from Francis Coppola when I was working on his Pinocchio project. Looking back at film history, what I didn’t know was that the aspect ratio in the silent and early sound movies was basically full frame. That allowed, particularly in silent movies, people to use their hands a lot because they had nothing else. They had no dialogue, so they had to use the whole frame. And so that’s what sold them on the dragon having, well, initially it was two wings and two back legs, but this had four legs and wings and had to talk and then it also do had to work on a subliminal level where the hands support the voice, the drama, or the sadness, or you can do so much acting with hands. And so they bought that.
Rob understood what I was talking about. We went back with Pete and we started designing first little maquettes. The visual effects at that time supervisor was, remind me if I’m wrong, Steve Price was there at the beginning.
Scott Squires: Steve Price was initially the visual effects supervisor on this show. He was also assigned to Jumanji as I recall, but he’d been kind of double-booked. I was finishing up on The Mask, I was just finishing up the last week of that and then I was pulled into the office and they said, ‘Well, we need somebody to fill in to be the VFX supervisor on this.’ And they said, ‘We want you to go to Slovakia for six months.’
But they didn’t want to tell Rob or Raffaella that I was to be the new visual effects supervisor. So I flew over and we’re tech scouting and I’m answering all their questions. Anyway, the next day Rob says at breakfast, ‘Is it possible you could be our VFX supervisor?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I think so…we’ll make that happen…’
b&a: And Phil, just completing the design work. One of the cool things about those days is that you mentioned maquettes were made. I mean, it’s unfortunate in a way in the digital age that we don’t get those as much, but how were those maquettes made back then?
Phil Tippett: The original ones were just quick sketches and sculpting. I think it was Steve and me at that time and go up to Rob’s place in Lake Tahoe and we’d work out the details with the designs and then Pete and I would go back and once that’d been formalized, we would start sculpting the final thing.
When they saw the first maquette, when ILM saw the first maquette of this thing, and I don’t know, Scott, if you can elaborate on this, but the feedback I got from ILM, they called it ‘Tippett’s Revenge’ for all the crap ILM put me through on Jurassic Park.
This thing had ‘too many spines’ and ‘too much detail with the scales’, had huge wings—they were huge wings they had to appear as though they were aerodynamic. So there a lot of design considerations and it was a fucking complicated thing. Well, it still would be to do now, but back then the technology just didn’t exist and so that’s kind of why it looks like it does.
b&a: Scott, do you remember that? Did people say, ‘Tippett’s Revenge’?
Scott Squires: I had heard that term before. I think they looked at it and this was the day when people were doing what they called enveloping, which was the skinning and so forth, and just the complexity of going in and adding the different weights for everything.
And of course, Phil comes up with the great design, but it’s so intricate, so detailed and has all this stuff going on. Obviously it gave pause to the modelers and they also realized, well, we’ve got to make it talk and get facial features and all these other things. So it was a huge challenge and they also knew that we didn’t have any software to do lip sync for this type of character.
b&a: I want to go to that test that Rob mentioned, which is the T-Rex from Jurassic Park put onto a CG neck. Scott, do you remember this and, and maybe Rob, can you chime in as well? Because I think that was so cool, but also a little bit bizarre.
Scott Squires: Rob may be able to speak more than I can because I saw after the fact. Judith Weaver was the visual effects producer and she said, ‘Well, so many months ago they did this test, they had a voice from Mel Gibson and they took the Jurassic Park creature and made the lips move.’ I guess the other thing to mention is Jim Henson at one point was involved and they had done a test of their own with a puppeteered dinosaur. Some of those tests were rather interesting as well.
Rob Coleman: It also predated me. I believe it was done by James Straus, who ended up being the character animation supervisor. I think I was still with Scott on The Mask, but we did see it. It was a proof of concept test using the Caricature software that had been generated or created, I think initially for Casper and then got refined. And the power of that was that it allowed us to have very dense data that we could move around in close to real-time, because the reality is with Phil’s design, when they finally pieced together the digital dragon and we loaded it into Softimage, we had no playback. Zero playback. The computers were not fast enough, so they had to create special switches and filters to turn the wings off, turn the tail off, turn the body off.
And we had a special camera rig that was attached to the head, so we could just load the head, which as Scott said earlier, was the equivalent to the T-Rex from Jurassic in terms of the amount of data. The dragon, I think, was four times that when you loaded everything in. And so when we did the early tests, we could only have a part of it. So I believe that James only had a T-Rex head, and they’d added in facial controllers for it.
I don’t even remember the dialogue. So I didn’t remember it was Mel Gibson. I certainly remember us doing early tests once we had Draco’s head and we had selected some audio of Sean Connery before we had him recorded for Dragonheart. There’s actually a line out of Dr. No when he is on the beach and he says—there’s a dragon vehicle in that movie—spoiler for people who haven’t seen Dr. No and he says, ‘There are no such things as dragons.’
Rob Cohen obviously was deeply concerned, as all of us were, about could we have Draco emote with this extremely famous voice? And so we selected lines of James Bond movies and Hunt for Red October and others as we developed the facial. We started to hone in on what is it about Connery and how he moved his face around that’s particular to him.
Scott Squires: I can remember all the animators had all these still photos on their workstations of different facial expressions from different Connery movies.
Rob Coleman: That’s exactly right, Scott. Most animators will have a mirror at their desk and they mimic what they’re animating, but also valuable are facial expression sheets and phonemes. So your A- E-I-O-U-M-B-P all your mouth shapes.
So we had gone through previous Sean Connery movies and selected images, as Scott said. And what we noticed was that Sean Connery had independent control over his eyebrows. So, I can’t do it, but he had one eyebrow go up and then he could move it and do the other. And the other thing he did, which was particular to him, is he would talk out of one side of his mouth and then it would move across. So he says, ‘I guess, Moneypenny…’ And he’d move it across that way. So we knew that we needed that kind of control for Draco to have, so we could bias it to one side or the other side. And we consciously were trying to mimic the way that he delivered his lines.
b&a: Rob, I wanted to make sure I give a shout out to Cary Phillips, who’s behind that Caricature tool.
Rob Coleman: The genius behind it, yes.
b&a: Which stayed in use at ILM for years, right? In terms of character of facial animation.
Rob Coleman: It did, and I’m only half joking, I still think about Caricature, Cari, and Cary Phillips, because it was a brilliant package to animate with. It was streamlined but it just gave us the control, and what it especially gave us was, as I remember, almost real-time with a huge amount of data.
You could play with your expressions and not wait and wait and wait, and then it pops to a different position. Then you’re like, no, it’s too far and move back again. Cari gave us the ability to work up our animation and see it play back and refine it and do it again and do it again. And I think that just simply having that allowed us to really get better and better with our facial animation.
I’ve also watched the movie recently and it hasn’t aged especially well, certainly in the amount that I’ve learned over the last 25 years in terms of facial expressions. My memory of it is better than what I actually saw when I watched it again. But I certainly have a very warm feeling about where we were at that time and what we were doing compared to what we had only just been doing a year or two before. It was a massive leap for its time.
Phil Tippett: I just have one word of advice—I had no idea about any of the technology that was being involved at that time, I totally didn’t understand it. So that was the last thing in my mind. And that’s actually what you want from a designer: they should know nothing about how complicated something is and they should just go for it. And then you adjust along the way.
Rob Coleman: Yeah. Agreed. Absolutely. I mean, it was Mount Everest for us, but we wanted to climb that mountain and we were incredibly proud of what we finally achieved. It was hard and it was difficult. And there were all kinds of meetings where we were trying to figure out, well, what technology, what software do we need? How do we approach this? Not only were we doing the performance, but then we can also talk about the amazing texturing, surfacing lighting, compositing that was done, because this was a photorealistic character that you see in the rain and in the water and underwater and all of the teams came together to produce a pretty phenomenal result for 1996.
b&a: What was the general shooting methodology in Slovakia with stuffies, stand-ins, practical heads, tennis balls on sticks and things like that?
Scott Squires: We did it all at one point. So we also took Phil’s stop-motion puppet. Essentially you guys had built a rigid model, but you also built one that had full ball joints and so forth. We used that a few times in front of the camera just to see what that would look like. I wrote a programme on my PowerBook 180 so I could mock up the size of the maquette and just say, ‘I’m using this lens’, and scale it and say, ‘Okay, that’s 35 feet away’. But a lot of times we had plywood cutouts of the head and we’d replace that.
I had all the measurements, we had a monster stick, so we knew the height and different sizes. So we’d go out there and record that. And one of the things that I did was gather up all kinds of markers of different types. We were covering in some cases up to a mile away for some of those shots. They had these plastic soccer ball things over there in Slovakia. We went to the toy store and bought a bunch of those and laid those out.
This was also the first show that we used a laser transit system on. So you could ping something that somebody would hold up, a prism on a special stick, however far away that might be and we could read that. I wrote a programme on the same PowerBook to go ahead and record all those data points. We’d ping all the different markers , because at this point, the match move was done by hand later, there was no automated process. They had to rebuild some of the landscape or whatever it was, the castle and track it like frame by frame or every so many frames to get the match move. So it was important that we have good data points to work with on all of that.
b&a: Was this fully shot in Slovakia?
Scott Squires: It was all done in Slovakia. I was there a total of six months, came back after three for a week or two because they had some additional shooting just of the battle, which I didn’t need to be there for. And, we also had a camera problem at one point. So I had to make sure all that got taken care, but the majority of it was shot outdoors at real locations.
For some of the wheat fields, I had the crew lay down and be like snow angels just so that we get the stuff moving properly. Then we ran, it was into Thanksgiving I think when we finally wrapped up. So we were dealing with ice and snow towards the end of production. So you had to be very careful walking around there.
Those castles are the real deal. They had built the whole waterfall, those types of things. Part of the shoot was in summer, we got up to 113 degrees out in the sun shooting in the wheat fields. The British crew were not used to the sun. Most of them were getting sunburn because they didn’t understand they needed some type of protection.
b&a: I want to jump into the animation. Phil, did you work on any animatics?
Phil Tippett: Essentially it was a moving storyboard. It was pretty clear what the objectives were and as long as we had something that was the equivalent of a rough sketch, then that would work.
Scott Squires: But Phil, as I recall I mean, it was actually 3D, right? Just a low res 3D, version?
Phil Tippett: Yeah, we were at that point with Tippett Studio, just trying to figure it all out. And Craig Hayes, who I had worked with for years who designed ED-209 in RoboCop, and the bugs in Starship Troopers, Craig had come up with this concept of doing motion capture because we didn’t have any animators at that time. All the computer graphic animators were at ILM and hard to find around the world.
Craig designed a motion capture bug that we later used in Starship Troopers for one of the first crowd scenes that was ever done. I mean, it was the first crowd scene doing motion capture, and yeah, so he built this, it was a suit with encoders on it, you could move around and I hired a friend of mine that was a dancer, performer, and would direct him to do what the dragon needed to do and then tried to clean that up as best we could and it was adequate for a stand-in.
b&a: Rob, how did blocking work back then? How did you start jumping into animation?
Rob Coleman: Well, before any of that, we all had to go to dragon school. And the reason was because of the number of animators that had come from doing Casper where you don’t have any feet on the ground and you’re not dealing with weight and physics and scale. A few animators had been on Jumanji so they had a quadraped experience, but they were rare.
Myself, I wasn’t on Casper or Jumanji and I remember James Straus, who is one of the most gifted animators I’ve ever worked with, he was on Jurassic Park and did amazing work. I remember us all sitting in the main theatre at ILM and James teaching us master classes on quadraped motion and studying previous films and then going back to our desk and trying to sort out quadraped walks and trying to get weight into the massive dragon.
I remember James being fairly exasperated with us as we bumbled our way through. But eventually we started to get it and we started to figure it out. And then as Scott mentioned, all the shots had to be match moved. So we didn’t put our dragon in until they had a digital
camera matching exactly the live action camera and all blocking started with what we called the ‘calamari rig’. The calamari rig is a very stripped down rig. Think of calamari when you get it in the restaurant, it’s little rings of squid, right? So we cut up the dragon into these little rings that you could pose quite quickly, actually, because you didn’t have all the data, all the scales, all the horns—it was a stripped down version of the character.
It had the control system in it, the skeleton, and we could pose it quickly and we would do a pose to pose blocking. So we would have Draco in his first position and then his next key position. And then we would show that first to James Straus, our supervisor, and then he would show to Rob Cohen, the director, as our first pass.
And we follow that to this day. Really, I mean, we can have characters that have a lot more data in them nowadays, we don’t have to have a calamari rig anymore, but the idea is the same. You want to block in your character so that it has the right scale position and attitude for a good silhouette before you go into doing it all the detailed performance or before you go anywhere close to animating on ones. So that’s how we did it.
Scott Squires: I should mention, one nice thing is, we were able to finish shooting the whole thing and then they edited it before we locked in the edit. Whereas a lot of times, they’re editing, locking in and you are working away all at the same time. So this had an actual longer post schedule than we typically were used to which allowed us some time to ramp up properly.
b&a: Do they ever lock picture anymore? Does that ever happen?
Rob Coleman: Not for me. Now with digital releases, they can tweak with it right up until it feels like the day before, it’s probably the week or two before, but, things have really changed.
Scott Squires: Yeah, and you can have international releases, which are different than the domestic. It’s almost like software now: version one, version two.
Rob Coleman: In fact, George Lucas had predicted this and said this to me back on the Star Wars prequels—he nailed it—he said this is going to happen. He said, ‘They’ll be beaming these movies to theaters. They’ll get the reaction from the studio or from the audiences and they’ll ask for revisions and they can then resend it back.’ It’s like, we’re almost there.
b&a: What was one of the more difficult shots or challenging shots that you found Rob, in terms of animation?
Rob Coleman: My memory about the hardest stuff was, well, when we first got it briefed on how Draco flew, there was a lot of discussion about his size/weight/mass. And I remember we really struggled and it all came flooding back when I watched the movie this week. Rob had wanted all of this motion through his chest, the beating of the wings and the amount of effort it would take to have a real creature that size take off.
What happened was, there are traveling shots where Bowen [Dennis Quaid] is on a horse in a wheat field and Draco is hovering and flying beside him and he doesn’t fit in the frame. He’s huge. And I remember I was talking to some of the animators in preparation for this call and Ken King, who was animating some of those shots, he said, ‘I was beating the wings like crazy and the field wasn’t reacting to it. They would’ve had to have a huge helicopter above pushing down the wheat.’
We took it to Rob Cohen and Rob said, ‘Oh no, no, he’s made of light. He’s light inside. He turns into light at the end of the movie. So he’s actually made of light so he doesn’t have to beat as heavily as you have him.’ Well, that was a complete change of direction, part-way through the movie. So you’ll see some shots where we’re labouring like crazy, which were done early on and then there’s other ones where he kind of sort of just floats around and he just sort of gently beats those massive wings of his. So, I remember that was a challenge.
Scott Squires: The wheat field, we kept thinking, okay, we’ll just be able to move that stuff. But it was thick. It was thick and rigid. Trying to move this stuff was almost impossible.
b&a: What do you remember about the integration challenges in terms of texturing, rendering and compositing back then, what do you remember was any kind of breakthrough on that film or what made it easier? What was hard about the ILM process back then?
Scott Squires: Well, at that point we had not locked in on gray spheres and silver spheres and doing a whole environmental capture. We had basically a large white pole that we were using for this. They were still trying to figure things out. I tried to record as much as we possibly could on the locations. The other thing I really tried to push was when we shot the live action was to try to get as much interaction as possible. So we’re with special effects supervisor Kit West and those guys so we tried to move rocks and do different things and for all the water and to the waterfall gag, all of that, I had them build rigs to do that.
So, say for the rain coming down, well, one of the things I had them do was build a unfolding tent up above to stop the rain at a certain point over Bowen. But the problem when we were shooting was that it started building up with rain and this thing was going to collapse on Dennis. So we put a stop to that, but in most cases we try to incorporate as much as possible.
b&a: I wanted to give you each an opportunity to share any other kind of memories or stories from Dragonheart that you might have been saving up after 25 years, that we didn’t mention. Scott, is there anything that you wanted to really share?
Scott Squires: Well, I guess a few things. There was no real internet at that time you could connect to. So when I went to the hotel in Slovakia and I remember only 3% of the people there spoke English, so we hired people who were Americans, but could speak Slovak. So I had to every night take my phone apart in the hotel and basically connect to my computer. And it was like 300 baud. One time they tried to send me an image from the film scanner and it just never made it.
I should mention that there’s no bluescreen or anything else like this. It’s all rotoscoping. So big thank you to the roto team on that. It’s fabulous. Especially the nighttime scenes with hair blowing and the rest of it was amazing work.
Also, special effects supervisor Kit West and his team did fantastic large explosions. Unfortunately, there were a few times where things didn’t go quite right on the location. When they get blown off the side of the wall that was supposed to be go along the wall but instead it just all went off at the same time.
There was also the point where Draco is flying over the fields and he’s basically doing a flame and causing those big burst of flames along that whole field. Well, they put napalm down there. So we had all these extras and then somebody says to Kit, ‘Are we worried about burning their heads?’ Oh no, no, we’re fine. And then when it goes off, you see the heat ripple come towards you and all the extras running, and then you start feeling it yourself and you start running yourself, because it was just so intense.
For the shot of Draco hitting the water, they were using on the camera, a spinning wheel. It’s to keep the water splash from covering up the lens. Unfortunately he was also using a polarizer at that same time—the spinning wheel isn’t actually glass, it’s made out of Plexiglas. So now you’ve got polarization going in the scene. So that’s why we had to, a number of months later, go back and re-shoot that scene because there was no way to correct that at all.
And then let’s see, other memorable moments or difficulties. The camera crane that they were using was right at a height so that you wouldn’t spot it, but it would hit me in the head. So I had stitches from that and they’d actually knocked out one of the modelers who was puppeteering the big mouth. He hit the camera crane and had to take a rest.
b&a: Rob, what about you?
Rob Coleman: The big memory is when Sean Connery came to ILM. He was shooting The Rock in San Francisco. I remember Judith Weaver called me into her office. She was jumping up and down and she was like, ‘You got to listen to this.’ She had recorded Sean Connery, not an assistant, Sean Connery himself, calling our producer. And it was something along the lines of, ‘Hello, Judith, it’s Sean Connery. I was wondering if I could come by for a visual.’ I swear, she said she would never, ever erase that off her phone.
Judith is quite a short gal. And so when she brought Sean Connery into our main theatre, he towered over her. He looks totally normal when you see him from afar, but he’s like a perfectly scaled up human. I mean, he is just, he’s big and he is impressive. So there he was and there was a presentation.
I have vague memories of that, but I checked with some of the old animators and Steve Nichols had a funny memory. He said Sean was brought to his desk. And Steve was one of our great animators and was asked to show one of his shots. We all worked very close to each other, so we all had headphones. Steve handed his headphones to Sean Connery, who put them on. Steve turned the shot on and by mistake, in his nervousness, he had turned up the volume to full. And so he’d blown out Sean Connery’s ears, who ripped off the headphones. Everything was fine because then Sean Connery then asked for an Altoid which Steve had on his desk and so that was okay.
The only other thing, which is more of an Easter egg, I had forgotten this and then Scott may remember. When Draco lands in the river and he doesn’t sink, he’s in that village. There’s a village. There’s one villager who yells. ‘Meat!’ Well, that’s Rob Cohen, the director. He’s wearing this funny hat. And so you can see him. So that’s the Easter egg for people who may want to go and see the movie. You see Rob Cohen running around in costume in that scene.
Scott Squires: Well, I’m actually in the film, too.
Rob Coleman: Ah, there you go.
Scott Squires: When they bring Young Einon in from being wounded, John Swallow, the producer from Universal was there, and we both are dressed in gear and we come in and the actress Julie Christie was there. So that was my three seconds of fame on that particular film.
b&a: And Phil what do you remember about the film that you maybe wanted to share in particular?
Phil Tippett: Well, like I said earlier, I don’t remember anything. Dragonheart that was not that difficult at all for me. Usually when I’ve been on a project, I feel like the victim of a violent crime and I just don’t want know about it. How old were you when you saw it?
b&a: I was 18. It’s very much part of the formative years of me getting into visual effects. I wanted to share my favorite scene, which I feel like got used a lot in demos for the film and like promotional stuff in terms of the CG. It’s something like where Kara says, ‘Well, you’re not like a dragon at all?’ And Draco says, ‘Well, how many dragons do you know?’ I really remember that, partly because of the delivery from the actor, but also the CG performance. It’s beautiful.
Rob Coleman: Lou Dellarosa was animating that scene. I think he animated that shot. Lou was one of our most talented animators and he was one of the first people to figure out the facial animation. And I remember that scene as well. That was an important moment, it was really nice as he leans in and Rob Cohen had had her lean back. So there’s some interaction there, they don’t touch, but you feel that he’s in that space. The lighting’s beautiful. He has got nice rounding to his head.
b&a: I wanted also to try and capture the moment that this film became recognized by your peers and the Academy, obviously for a VFX Oscar nomination. Back then, there were only three films nominated for the visual effects Oscar. Independence Day ended up winning, Twister was another nominee and obviously Dragonheart. Scott coming to you. What do you remember about that time?
Scott Squires: We were very happy for the nomination. Each year, they seemed to have different seating for the different people. So that year we were on the right side of the theater and I don’t think anybody on the right side of the theater won all night, as I recall. And we’re sitting there and Phil looks over at me and says, ‘There’s not a chance we’re going to win this.’
Phil Tippett: I forgot I was even nominated. I have no memory about this whatsoever. Usually what I do is when I know it’s coming and you know, it’s coming because of the way the box office works, I’ll just go and hang out at the bar and just wait for it all be over.
b&a: They really were incredible films that year I felt because it was this clear mix of practical and miniature work, with all the CG and digital compositing coming in. Rob to you, you could feel that change coming in the industry, right?
Rob Coleman: At that time, I don’t know if it was obvious. I mean, certainly I was on the computer animation side. So we were thrilled that we were able to contribute because most of us were all inspired by the work that had come before us. And in many ways we were standing on the shoulders of the great visual effects people who had created the movies that we watched as kids and then as teenagers, and then inspired us to go into this as a career. I don’t know, honestly, whether I could see the sea change then, because it was, as you just pointed out, still very much a mix.
Later on, George Lucas told me that it was Dragonheart and then Men in Black that convinced him that digital characters had progressed enough that he was then ready to start doing the prequels. So it was an important film, certainly for ILM, but I think for the industry as well. People looked at it and went, wow, a digital character can hold its own with the real actors.
There’s even more Dragonheart coverage in my book, Industrial Light & Magic: 50 Years of Innovation.
