Making of Dragon Heart 3

A making-of for Dragonheart 3: The Sorcerer’s Curse, the 2015 Universal fantasy prequel in which Ben Kingsley voices the dragon Drago. It follows the visual effects from photographed plate to finished shot, with the emphasis on creature animation — the dragon itself — alongside the simulation, digital environments and compositing built around it.

Putting a dragon into live-action footage is mostly a problem of agreement. The animal has to agree with the light on the day, with the ground it stands on, with the eyeline of an actor who was looking at nothing, and with its own mass: wings that displace air, a body that settles when it lands. That means rigging and keyframe animation before anything else, then shading and grooming detailed enough to survive a close shot, fire and smoke simulation whose light spills back onto the photographed scene, and digital matte work to open the landscape behind it. Rotoscoping, paint and a composite tuned to the plate’s own light close the loop. A making-of is useful precisely because it separates those stages out; Terminal FX practises all of them, and this one covers the studio’s creature and effects work on Dragonheart 3.