DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: Inside the F/X Lair, Part 2

By: Steve Ryfle
Date: Thursday, December 07, 2000

Dungeons & Dragons is a game of medieval mystery and magic, and its public reputation over the past few decades has been marked by fear and misunderstanding, mostly because a few mixed-up kid devotees took their own lives or, even worse, other people's lives. So perhaps it's fitting that the big-screen adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons is also shrouded in a little mystery and magic: the mystery surrounding all the problems between director-producer Courtney 'Corey' Solomon and the original F/X house that worked on the movie, Station X Studios; the magic performed by the F/X pros at several other companies that completed the film in record time, and rescued D&D from the clutches of death.

Last week, Fandom took you along on our brief tour of VisionArt, the Santa Monica, California studio that created most of the character animation effects for the film. Following the tour, there was a question-and-answer session attended by online media, wherein Solomon and various VisionArt F/X technicians spoke about the difficulties of bringing the world's most famous (and formerly, the most notorious) role-playing game to the screen. What follows is an abridged transcript of that session:

HOW MUCH TIME DID YOU HAVE TO COMPLETE THE F/X?

SOLOMON: Well, originally the time period was supposed to be as we were shooting the film. That would have started in May of 1999, in fact they started in March of 1999. But the first facility fell out, as I said before, and so the work with all the houses that did the stuff that's in the movie really started from about late January of this year, until about October. And that includes all the way through, you know, them starting off with just basically nothing, except our conceptual designs and a couple of maquettes, and having to take it all the way through what we would consider conceptual stages, and then actually getting the effects to the point where they were finalized. So, totally, about 10 months.

WAS THE F/X WORK FROM THE ORIGINAL HOUSE JUST NOT UP TO SNUFF?

SOLOMON: I don't want to diss anybody [laughs]. I would say that what happened was, they weren't as organized as they should have been. So, they were actually paid a lot of money, and when I got back from shooting the filmobviously, when I'm shooting the film I'm concentrating on shooting the filmI come back, and I have one [F/X] shot done out of what's supposed to be over 200. The count's over 500 now. The reality of the situation is, they just didn't organize their time well enough. They had done this incredible CG citywhich, I think everybody at this table agrees, hands down, was great, great, phenomenal work. But they put everything into that. And so, when we looked at the dragons, we were just like, 'ooookayyyy.'

You just went through this tour. Forget the final [dragon] shots that you were shown. Go back to the blue one. And imagine it's got a little bit more texture, and it's proposed as the final shot. And ask yourself how happy we were or weren't about that. The tough thing about our movie was, we're an independent movie with not enough money to begin with, and we're what we call a bonded movie. Which means there's somebody there that insists that we finish the movie, come hell or high water, or they're responsible to pay the bank back for all the money we borrowed to make the movie. So it was a tough situation ... fortunately, they worked really well with us, and let us go out to all these great [F/X] houses and restart everything from scratch. Mainly [the problem] was, we never thought [the original F/X company] would finish. Maybe they might have got the quality to where it should have been, eventually. Hard to say, we hadn't been able to work with them enough to know. But the reality of the situation was, they had seven months while we were shooting the movie [and] we had one thing done, and I'll tell you what the shot was: It was a little squirrel flying across the room. Now, if you compare shots with 150 dragons, city, fireballs, everything else...well, I waited seven months and got a squirrel flying across the room. So you can imagine I wasn't too happy about that.

You know, I always say everything works out for a reason. The F/X we ended up with are really, really good, and all the people that worked on them did a great job and went 10 miles beyond the call of duty. A lot of these people worked on weekends and did things they don't ordinarily have to do. Marc Kolbe didn't charge as much as he usually would have. And the reality is that they turned out really well. If we had these people from day one, going through it with us in pre-production...honestly speaking, the quality of F/X you would see would be even way better than it already is, and that just goes without saying.... For this type of picture, and the number of effects we had, and the complexity of effects, and the money we had, the time that everybody had was really short in comparison to what you should have. Look how long Lucas spends on effects like that. Years and years up front before they're actually done.... The more time, the better off you are. Live action and CG really have to work hand-in-hand in this type of movie, and that was probably the hardest thing. Next time around, I'd do it entirely differently. I know who my team would be, who our producers would be, who our facilities would be, who's strong at what, and who's not strong at what. Because each facility has different strengths. VisionArt's greatest strength is character animation, whereas a different place like Digital Firepower, I would never even let them touch a dragon. They're a great facilityif you want them to do a city landscape or a matte painting for you, then that's the place you want to go. So, it just depends on who your artists are, and what their individual strengths and weaknesses are.

WITH THE SHORT SCHEDULE, DID YOU GET ALL THE F/X THAT YOU WANTED?

SOLOMON: No. You want to hear a story? The end sequence was entirely storyboarded and shot a certain way in Prague. We had this huge, 50 x 50 [foot] set constructed, and there was 220 feet of blue screen around it, and there were all these shots constructedwhere the dragon battle was supposed to be happening, how they [the dragons] would interact with Jeremy Irons or Justin Whalen or Bruce Payne, whoever it was on the rooftop. We shot the whole thing with this other [F/X] facility supervising. First day we go out there and start shooting on this set, the entire set basically collapses on us. In other words, it's no longer stable, so all the digital tracking markers are doing this [makes wavering motion with his hands] on every shot, with every piece of movement that you have. So I have to rewrite the endingthis is actually by day three, to be fair, and we were on that set for about 17 daysI had to actually rewrite that whole ending sequence, right there on the fly, while they were fixing the set. There were two levels to it, and I had to get everybody off the first level so we could bring in wooden braces and metal braces, so it could be stabilized. But it could only hold a certain number of people. [Then I had to] go back to another location that we had already shot...reshoot how they got out of that location three months after we [originally] did it, and then go and do the whole thing. The bottom line is, the dragon battle was completely storyboarded...and because we had to make all these changes, and I was a first time director, it was really tough because we had to basically throw out half the storyboard and do it right there, on the set. We did this conjunction with the other [F/X] facility, so we were all quote-unquote on the same page.

Well, guess what? When we came back [from Prague], we apparently weren't on the same page, so once we brought in VisionArt and the new [F/X] facilities, we had to reconstruct the dragon battle from scratch, [with the] movie already in the can. Took what we had and said, 'OK, what are we going to do here, what are we going to do here, what are we going to add there, what are we going to take out here?' So on and so forth, and re-put it back together again, kind of like the bionic man, and try to make it better than it was before. So it isn't what it was originally intended to be, but that was a product of circumstances. It happens in movies all the timeyou run into problems, but this of course was a big, big problem.... When we reconstructed it, it all worked the way we wanted it to, but obviously if we had been together in the first place we could have given you the best of both worlds. Sometimes you stuck with a bum situation, and you've got to do what you can to complete it and do it the best that can be done under the circumstances.

The ending of the movie is not the ending that was scripted. In fact, nobody's ever seen the scripted ending of the movie because when we were out there, we decided it wasn't big enough. Jeremy Irons was actually the one who decided it wasn't big enough. He wasn't happy, so he decided to stay there with me, for several hours, and say 'This ending's not big enough, so we're not shooting anything right now.' Well, OK, Jeremy. [Laughs] So, we made this much bigger ending, which he was much happier with. But part of that ending included Thora Birch, and we had already shot Thora Birch's section of what Jeremy was supposed to be doing to her in this climactic moment. Unfortunately, it didn't match with the new ending of what was going to happen to Jeremy. So we actually had to create CG around what Thora Birch was doing, which wasn't the CG that was originally intended to be there. So her performance was actually very different, so we had to create a creature that would go with the performance that she had, in order to make it work. It was a backwards way of doing CG. One of the other facilities created the 3-D creature that we did for that, and then there's other things, like a dragon which people have been referring to as a 'dragon-witch,' that's in a couple shots in trailers, that was done by another house as well.

HOW MANY F/X SUPERVISORS WERE THERE?

SOLOMON: There was an original supervisor from the one house that was on the set in Prague. Then when we got back and changed it, we got a new supervisor; then somebody wasn't happy with that supervisor so that supervisor we got rid of. Then there was another one, but that one left. Then we ended up with one called Joan Collins, who actually ended up being the best oneknew her job very well. So we ended up going through four, to be honest. Each house has their own supervisor that runs their own shop, and then of course with me as director, I have to give unity to everything, and my producer and supervisor is supposed to oversee each of the houses individually. And that's generally the way it's done.

WHAT WERE YOUR CHALLENGES IN CREATING THE F/X?

ALADINO DEBERT (character animator): One thing that I've never seen before is just the sheer amount of dragons and creatures. Between the foreground dragons and our flocking [CG] stuff in the background, some shots have up to about 100 dragons, I think. And that's 100 dragons interacting, fighting, flying around the city and shooting fireballs. Based on that, I think that was the most complicated thing I've ever seen done. It was just a logistical nightmare, because there's a lot of animation, and they all have to look good, and despite the fact that just the hero dragons...are the ones you really pay attention to, the ones in the background, if they're not doing the right thing, it really shows up. So that was really complicated.

MARC KOLBE (digital F/X supervisor): I think the time frame was the biggest challengejust the sheer amount, and for the quality we were going after. A lot of us had come off Godzilla, so we had kind of a bar that we were trying to hit and go past. So we took everything we learned there and applied it here. So, that's how we did it in the time frame. We had done a lot of the R&D work.



SOLOMON: Let's take, for example, the great city they had in Episode I: the city and some of the establishing looked really good, but you never went really deep into the streets of that city or anything like that, where you actually got close to it, unless you were doing a green-screen shot where you had all the people in the foreground and you were adding CG background and that would give you your city. In our city, you actually go deep into the core of the buildings, which was something we wanted to make completely photo-realistic, and take you to a different place beyond your traditional wide matte painting, where you see it off in the distance.... And then, when you combine that with the fact that part of our dragon battle takes place through the buildings of that city, I don't think anybody's done stuff like that before; I don't anybody's even attempted to do things like that before. Certainly all of us would have liked to have more time and money, but when have you ever seen a dragon battle? Ours is eleven minutes at the end of the movie, at the big, huge, climactic sequence. You don't see those kinds of things happening.