Inside Pete’s Dragon's Amazing Visual Effects

[Offscreen] What's a dragon?

Shhh

(dragon growling)

That's a dragon.

(intense music)

Hi I'm Mike Seymour from fxguide.com for Wired.

Well, we at digital in New Zealand know

a thing or two about fire breathing dragons,

having done The Hobbit with the Desolation of Smaug,

but perhaps they do a little but less about

the furry vanishing kind.

That is until director David Lowery,

Pete's Dragon came to New Zealand.

(peaceful music)

Well the film begins in the Pacific Northwest,

somewhere in the recent past.

I knew we needed something special for the story,

for the characters and I had a sneak suspicion

that we would find that in New Zealand.

Elliot

(Elliot growling)

Pete's Dragon, Elliot, presented some real challenges

to the visual effects team.

Chief among them was this idea of Elliot's invisibility.

During the course of the film,

the nature of this changes depending on

kind of the emotion of the scene.

Now in some scenes such as this,

Elliot is effectively camouflaged

and in other times he is actually invisible.

In other words, sometimes the way the artist needed Elliot

to appear to have the texture or the background on him.

And at other times we needed to sorta have the idea

that we're seeing through him to the forest beyond.

And the camouflage was mainly used in the earlier scenes.

And whenever Elliot has a texture on him and he moves,

he's incredibly readable.

It's actually served a fairly interesting purpose

for when Elliot gets angry.

You see, the dragon has some 28 custom grooms

of over 20 million individual hairs.

And they were all simulated quite separately,

so as the camouflage texture was projected on them in 3D

if for example his fur blew in the wind,

the camouflage would kind of break up.

The team latched onto this

and used it when Elliot gets angry.

Given the idea that he was kind of losing his camouflage

when he was losing his cool.

Let's go huntin'.

We're dumb!

(roar)

Elliot fly!

This particular shot was the first one

that the team did of the invisibility,

and it comes at the end of the film, it's quite sad.

Now the problem here

is that unlike the camouflage sequences,

how do you actually read

where a giant invisible creature actually is?

The team solved this by adding kind of particles

and flop to the air.

The disturbance of the still forest air gives

the very elegant solution that the director wanted

without introducing anything that's

kind of magical or breaks the rather somber

and sad tone at this point in the film.

While the film had been previewed by proof in L.A.

The filmmakers opted to not

have practical stuff happening on set.

Wherever you see the dragon interacting with something,

be that trees, undergrowth, or plants

they were also all added digitally in post.

(grass crunching and bird chirping)

Oscar nominated visual effects supervisor Eric Saindon

actually joined Pete's Dragon directly from the Hobbit.

He actually helped redesign the character a bit

by making the nose more nose like,

apparently horses have very expressive noses.

As well as working on the ears,

bringing them down on the side of the head,

making them less cat like and more of that of a dog.

And if you're wondering how you

kind of get young actors to give a really good performance

when they're effectively meant to be working

with what is after all kind of a giant,

flying, and green, furry pet dog.

Eric Saindon himself walked around on set

with a giant 24 foot pole with a ball on the end of it.

He actually acted out the role of Elliot in the film.

All this comes together in a really complex retelling

of the 1970's Disney classic.

Well please don't forget to subscribe

for more behind the scenes action.

I'm Mike Seymour for Wired.

[Pete] Faster!

Elliot!