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the Hippogriff in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban—as it was clearly a fantasy creature, but in the film felt like a real animal from the natural world. Before the film was greenlit proper, I worked for three months with Framestore's global director of animation, Michael Eames, and the Framestore Visual Development team, led by Owen Jackson, to cre- ate the imagery showing that a live-action Night Fury would work. Working in Photoshop, ZBrush, and Blender, the team was able to freely explore multiple options of how he could look before getting involved in the intricacies of the full VFX asset pipeline. We refer- enced real-world animals—snakes, lizards, salamanders, black pan- thers, etc.—as we started playing with his overall proportions, eye size, and thickness of scales. Even at this early stage, anatomy was really important to delivering a believable creature that at the same time retained the key traits of the beloved original design. The result of this initial work was a Toothless who was much big- ger than in the original films, but with a proportionally smaller head and longer neck. His bat-like wings were also much larger. That was just the start, though—the heavy liing of creating the Toothless that would be seen in the final film fell to Andy Kind, Kayn Garcia, and the asset team in London. One of the biggest challenges were his eyes—being so large, they really needed structure and depth to connect with Hiccup and audi- ence. In the end, though colored like cat eyes with a feline pupil, the anatomy and structure was actually based on the human eye, where the iris has a lot of shape and depth as well as texture. There was also an incredible amount of work in his overall anato- my, from the skeleton outward, that went through a lot of iteration and finesse. As with most of the dragons in the film, their proximity to camera and fairly long shots meant there was nowhere to hide. How did you blend detailed artistry and ground-breaking technology to create unique features, behaviors, and flight patterns for each dragon? Christian Mänz: Much like Toothless, the brief from Dean for the other dragons was for them to be as grounded and real world as possible, but always with a hint of character and whimsy. We also had more freedom to explore their appearance versus the animated feature versions, which were quite caricatured. We did some concept design with the Framestore art depart- ment—Rob Bliss, Paul Catling, and Sam Rowan had all been key col- laborators during my time on Fantastic Beasts—Rob and Paul also being responsible for the design of multiple creatures for the Harry Potter franchise. It felt to me that both their visual aesthetic and ability to create iconic characters would be a perfect fit for the task ahead. Reference from the natural world was key to the believability of all of the dragon designs—be it crocodiles for the Monstrous Nightmare or ostriches for the Deadly Nadder. Giving the creatures character- istics in look and behavior that the audience sees in the real world would help us embed them into the live-action photography next to the actors. Once we had a set of concepts that Dean was happy with, we then moved these into Visual Development—the same as we had done with Toothless. The aim was to answer questions about anato- 10 cgw j u ly • a u g u s t • s e p t e m b e r 2 0 2 5