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10 ■ CGW Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 014 CG CHARACTERS Dragon Moves To create the dragon's performance, animators keyframed the digital character. Actor Benedict Cumberbatch provided Smaug's voice. "We couldn't do performance capture because, obviously, Benedict is not a dragon and the motion wouldn't apply," Saindon says. "The dragon was keyframed by animators who had video of Benedict they could reference. When he was on the ADR stage [soundstage], we used little Sony handheld cameras to take videos while we recorded the dialog. He got down on all fours and really got into the motion." Later, the animators who created Smaug's performance found that the look in Cumberbatch's eyes and the way he moved his head was particularly helpful reference. "Obviously, we don't have a one-to-one match with a drag- on, but we tried to put Benedict's head nuances and his pres- ence into the scene when we could," Clayton says. "Without Benedict's voice and presence, Smaug wouldn't feel as cool as he does now, but Smaug is an animated creature. We used Benedict's performance only as a reference for personality; we didn't apply it directly. Smaug has a crocodilian snout and loose skin around his muzzle and eyes. His head is massive – the size of a van or bigger. You have to articulate it slowly or it breaks the illusion." At first, the team didn't know whether the dragon would talk telepathically, with a jaw that opened for a magical voice, or with full articulation. By applying early dialog recordings of Cumberbatch onto a digital model of Smaug articulated with a simple facial puppet, the animation team created a test of the dragon moving its mouth and lips as it talked. "Fran [Walsh, writer/producer] and Peter [Jackson] liked it and that gave us confidence that we could create an engag- ing performance," Clayton says. "After that, we went to work making a facial puppet with good controls so it would be ready when the sequence was ready to animate." All through the sequence, Smaug and Bilbo engage in a testy conversation, and the camera frequently focuses on Smaug's face. "Even though a crocodile has rigid scales and skin, we decided to move Smaug's lips," Clayton says. As is typical for creatures that talk, the rigging team at Weta created an articulated model based on the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which breaks expressions down into individual muscle movements. "We tried to channel Smaug's face into our FACS system to keep as many of those controls as we could – lip stretches, brow control, and so forth, so we could animate his face in the same way we could animate Gollum's face using a similar control set. On Gollum, though, we have upper-lip left and right controls. On Smaug, we have upper-lip mid, back, left, and right to have more fidelity and accommodate his long snout." Smaug's body presented additional challenges. He crawls through the shifting heap of gold coins, articulates with his hands, and presses his hands into the pile causing avalanches of gold coins. "The control system worked for his flight mode, as well," Clayton says. "We tucked the membrane part of his wings behind his elbow. The challenge was in finding great poses that made him feel predatory and really arrogant. He's confident, but also suspicious, paranoid. It was an animator's dream to perform such an awesome character voiced by such a great actor." Shifting Treasure During one shot in the treasure hall sequence with Bilbo, Smaug bursts out from beneath the massive pile of gold coins and slithers around a column. As he moves, coins shift through- out the cavern and fly into the air around the characters. "In that shot, we simulated 18 million coins at once," Saindon explains. "To get that scale, we had to write a new rigid-body solver that could move millions of coins quickly. The new solver allowed us to fill the huge spaces with a volume of RBD (rigid-body dynamics) coins, not just a We first see the character Beorn (actor Mikael Persbrandt) in his bear form, a fierce, almost werewolf type of bear with no cuddly teddy-bear appeal. "He was a big design challenge," says Dave Clayton, animation supervisor. "Peter [Jackson] wanted the facial features of a bear, but didn't want him to feel exactly like a bear. We wanted him to be a fearsome creature, not cute and huggy. He's very muscular. He, Smaug, and the spiders were our main keyframe challenges on this film." In the film, Beorn guards his house and protects the dwarves from a band of Orcs, then transforms into his hu- man form. "We spent a long time getting his look right," says Visual Effects Supervisor Matt Aitken. "We like to reference nature, but as we worked on the shots, Peter felt we were straying into having him look too appealing. Even a grizzly bear has a bit of a teddy bear about him if it isn't roaring, which is the last thing we wanted. So we made the button on our bear's nose smaller, made his eyes fiercer, his teeth fiercer, and his fur darker and scruffier. The clincher was not having a plush look to him at all." The transformation from bear to man happens quickly in the film, at night, in the moonlight. "We were nervous about how it would play," Aitken says. "So we initially staged it as a series of glimpses between the trees. Peter told us to strip all the trees back to see it clearly. He said we could add trees later. But the creature department did such Bear of a Man