MYTHOLOGY-INSPIRED MOVIE CREATURES

Christian Manz explores how the fascinating worlds of mythology influenced the films’ concept design

“Both creatures [for The Secrets of Dumbledore] were based on mythological animals. The qilin was based on a Chinese mythological creature and the manticore on a Greek mythological animal, and they’re always very difficult because they’re in the mythological world and in Jo’s [J.k.rowling] world. She’s inspired by that stuff. That’s what’s fun, is that melding. So, we start from that point of view. One of the things that we have done with the Fantastic

Beasts films is imagine what was the thing that people once claimed they saw. We’re reading that thing between fantasy and fantastic. The manticore design came together quicker than the qilin, which was a two-year journey. The manticore sits down in a lion’s pose with its tail wrapped around it sort of like a cat, and then for its face we looked at tribal masks and then we were looking at beetles. If something’s big you get glimpses and that makes it more scary.”

we threw the net wide and, in the end, actually, the final design of the qilin was Sam Rowan, who used to work at Framestore, but by the time we finished it he was working from his home overseas.”

THE DESIGN PROCESS

Christian then goes on to explain Framestore’s emphasis on a non-linear approach to concept development for the film. “Before we would have had a concept that would have been done by concept artists working with the production designer, and that would then be signed off by the director,” he notes. “Then a beautiful sculpt will be made, and then they’d shoot maybe with that. And then we’d get to postproduction and they’d go ‘Here you are guys: here’s your approved stuff. Make that.’ Our thing now is to get all of that done before we shoot because we want to know a creature works. Sometimes, when all of that work’s been done and you get to postproduction, you spend months trying to make something and then find that you have to go back through a whole load of other approvals to get it reapproved and get it in the movie. With the art department we give them a brief of what the creature is and what it does. It’s the gist of what it does. They’re not reading the script, I’m just giving them an overall brief.” Christian then makes a particular point about where reality and fantasy meet in the movies, saying that: “One of the key things the art department do is look at real stuff. They’ll be doing something and then we’ll have animators in-house who are already taking what they were doing and modelling it up and getting it moving to find its character. That’s what we do when I talk about the non-linear process. That’s what we’ve found a real success through when working on these movies. And so, by the time you’re filming, you know what that creature is and how it’s behaving.”

Christian unpacks the non-linear process in further detail: “It’s a minor element we’ve been experimenting with recently, but because of the way that Framestore’s set up it’s so rapid. We can send a digital maquette that we’ve done in Zbrush over to the animation department and they can do something amazing with it. Perhaps build a better version. That’s what’s fascinating and so exciting about VFX is that back and forth between artists. With the latest film, for the work that I did on the wyvern and the manticore, we had that really fun section at the beginning and then we kind of revisited it. The production

What’s so exciting about VFX is that back and forth between artists

needed it to be a bit more believable and so I then had about six weeks working with Ben Locke and his team to really bring it into a believable [design]. The wings were kind of saillike, folding into the body. We realised that this was the only way it was going to work: that the wings would kind of fit snugly against the body. But what was amazing was you’d get the animation back and then work on top of that. In VFX, none of this stuff is made in a vacuum.”

CREATING THE WYVERN

Of the design for the wyvern, Christian adds, “We had a concept of the wyvern [in February 2019] and we realised that all of the Harry Potter dragons were wyverns, and so we came up with something different.” Christian recalls that a key challenge was to make the design less ‘dinosaury’ and more obviously birdlike and, on-set with director David Yates, he found a video clip online of the shoebill stork and it was that which informed the final behaviour for the dragon. “Framestore went back to concept [for the wyvern], and we came up with something that was a dragon that didn’t have feathers, but had kind of the same sort of head. But, we also knew then that it had to