Production Companies Fox 2000 Pictures, Davis Entertainment, Dune Entertainment, Ingenious Film Partners, Major Studio Partners, Mid Atlantic Films, Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation
The completion of the second unit work in Hungary marked only the first step in the scene’s creation. Fangmeier, MacDonald and crew then moved to Pinewood Studios in England, where they shot blue screen work of Ed Speleers “riding” Saphira, battling Robert Carlyle’s Durza who is astride his own flying Beast. The filmmakers wanted to push these flying scenes to get, as MacDonald says, “the most dynamic sensation possible. It’s a real roller-coaster ride.”
The actors were placed on computer-controlled rigs on hydraulics, upon which saddles were mounted. All the dragon’s movements – flying, gliding, banks-and-turns – could be experienced by Ed Speleers as Eragon. “Ed was a natural,” says MacDonald. “He loved flying, and really wanted to get things right.” Before Speleers began work on the motion rig, the filmmakers screened for him the pre-visualization footage as a reference for his “flying” maneuvers.
“ERAGON is the first film to really show the experience of flying on a dragon,” says Fangmeier. “It was a lot of fun to create the flying sequences. We were challenged to maintain a physical reality but also have an element of the fantastical. We wanted dragon riding to feel like being on a jet fighter – with lots of ‘Wow’ moments.”
Many of these “wow” moments were realized by New Zealand-based visual effects house WETA Digital, whose many credits include the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, “King Kong” and “I, Robot.” For the climactic Battle of Farthen Dûr sequence, WETA worked on giving Saphira a more aggressive “performance.” “She’s taking on a more mature air at this point; she’s come of age,” says WETA visual effects supervisor George Murphy. “We gave Saphira an additional sense of command, presence and agility that would get her through the battle.”
“We developed Saphira in a physical way,” adds WETA visual effects supervisor Guy Williams. “We have lots of views of her wings that occur during the battle, which are different from those of other scenes.” Williams and Murphy also made the dragon combat-ready, with an impressive suit of armor.
In creating the lighting environments for the battle sequence, Williams and Murphy’s goal, again, was to have audiences connect with Saphira, as they would with the film’s human characters. They devised a realistic yet striking look for shots of her soaring majestically through the night – or conducting “strafing runs” on the enemy forces. “If we had relied only on light that was available, we’d have ended up with a couple of highlights of Saphira from the moon and that’s about it,” notes Murphy. “So we came up with a color palette and levels that render Saphira visible, while reinforcing the fact that this is happening at night.”
Murphy and Williams also created the fearsome creature that Durza conjures up out of the essence of the dead troops below. The Beast battles Saphira in an epic airborne duel. As described in the script, the conjured creature is a methodical killing machine bereft of fear or remorse. It is an enormous, dark, broiling cloud of smoke and ash – the face of death itself.
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