Hungarian Horntail is the label given to a Dragon species in Joanne Rowling’s Harry Potter series of novels. Specifically, one single individual of this monstrous species appears in the fourth book, The Goblet of Fire, as the first trial of the Triwizard tournament. The Dragon guards a golden egg, which has to be obtained avoiding the beast’s fiery rage. In the novel, the task, while certainly difficult, was resolved relatively quickly — with the aid of Harry’s broom; in the film adaptation, the Dragon breaks free from its chain and chases the wizard in a long action sequence, which ends with the beast falling into a chasm. it is unclear if the Hungarian Horntail survived or not.

Both the novel and the script for the film adaptation are not detailed in their description of the Dragon. The most recognizable trait is the creature’s tail — which ends in a spined, club-like protrusion, used for offense — hence the name ‘Horntail’. Paul Catling, designer of most creatures from the Harry Potter series, had considerable creative liberty on the design of the Dragon. The special effects team, however, set out to make a spectacular, surprising creature. “The biggest challenge is to make them not look like what anyone else has done,” said Nick Dudman. “So when you’re doing dragons, werewolves, anything that’s iconic you hit a problem because a lot of the good ideas have already been done, so you have to find a different angle.”

Concept art by Paul Catling.

In the tradition of DragonSlayer, and in line with the first film of the series, the final Hungarian Horntail features a Wyvern-like configuration, with a total of four limbs. The front hindlegs also served as the creature’s formidable wings. The dorsal region of the creature, starting from the back of the head itself, presents a series of bony thorns, some of which can be moved in a threatening manner — much like a crest or a frill. The namesake thorned club at the end of the tail was kept.

Once again, Nick Dudman and his special effects team took on the duty to bring the Dragon to the screen. Two small scale maquettes were sculpted, created in fibreglass and painted for reference — both for the computer generated model and the imposing, full-size animatronic model. Kate Hill led the creation of the full-size sculpture, aided by Waldo Mason, Andy Hunt and other sculptors. The creature’s skin, created in Polyurethene, was also painted by Hill and Mason. The thorns on the Dragon’s head, neck and back were created in coloured resin, and were of 6 different sizes; a total of 200-300, including ‘backup’ thorns (in case the mounted ones broke) were made. The larger spikes were reinforced with fibreglass matting. Each thorn was individually hand finished, and painted once put in place on the Dragon.

The finished full-size Horntail animatronic. The thorns on the head and back of the creature were actually sharp and pointed — as you can see, the ones on the head are covered with rubber protections.

The finished Dragon animatronic was mounted on a mobile, wheeled unit — which eased transport of the enormous prop. The head could turn around and roar, the wings could make limited movements and the body was able to move from side to side. Peculiar to this model was an actual fire-breathing function, installed in the neck of the animatronic by John Richardson’s mechanical effects team. Due to that, obviously, the internal and external materials of the head were made fireproof.

In the final version of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the practical model was unfortunately left entirely unused, replaced by the computer generated model (created by Industrial Light & Magic) in all the scenes scheduled for its appearence. The practical Horntail would, however, have brief time of glory during the film’s world premiere in London.

The Horntail animatronic with the flame-throwing feature in action.

Special thanks to Shaune Harrison, who provided most of the information and pictures featured in the article and gallery.

For more pictures of the Hungarian Horntail, visit the Monster Gallery.

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All at once there was a scraping noise and the egg split open. The baby dragon flopped on to the table. It wasn’t exactly pretty; Harry thought it looked like a crumpled, black umbrella. Its spiny wings were huge compared to its skinny jet body and it had a long snout with wide nostrils, stubs of horns and bulging, orange eyes.

It sneezed. A couple of sparks flew out of its snout.

‘Isn’t he beautiful?’ Hagrid murmured. He reached out a hand to stroke the dragon’s head. It snapped at his fingers, showing pointed fangs.

‘Bless him, look, he knows his mummy!’ said Hagrid.
-J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

In designing Norbert for the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Paul Catling tried to steer close to the description of the creature, particularly emphasizing the proportions of its head, legs and wings compared to its body, and the size of its eyes in regards to the head; Catling focused in giving the character “awkward gawkiness.” As the creature is a baby, the filmmakers resolved that the eponymous ‘ridgeback’ wouldn’t be developed yet. Creative licenses included the colour scheme, more varied than the simple black of the novel version. After a final design was selected, Catling sculpted it into a maquette, which was used as reference for the digital model. Richard Hollander and his team at Rhythms & Hues modeled the creature digitally from scratch. Wrinkly skin and muscle simulations were devised by Mark Rodahl and Will Telford.

Norbert was endowed with subtle iridescence on his back and other details. “He had a bony little rib cage,” Hollander said, “and some nice iridescence on his back, little chicken feet, wet and leathery bat wings, a body like a lizard. We gave him double lids on his eyes, a set of horns on the back of his head, a little pointy tongue, a nice tail that he could swish, and a very bendy neck.”

On set, John Richardson puppeteered a large prop egg by directing air jets from underneath the table. In the hatching shot, the egg is replaced by a digital counterpart, which cracks open with a small gaseous explosion. Hollander commented: “you first see one arm burst out of the egg shell, then he climbs out, bery wobbly, staggers, slips on a piece of eggshell, begins to sniffle, then sneezes, producing a fireball that singes Hagrid’s beard. Chris Columbus wanted us to play the scene like when a little kid pees and people think it’s cute. Norbert is very sweet and innocent, even though he’s a dragon, and Hagrid just loves him.”

The animation process was supervised by Craig Talmy, and performed in Voodoo. Houdini and Vmantra were used by Pauline Ts’o to light and render the dragon; the elements were then composed in Icey by Harry Lam.

For more pictures of Norbert, visit the Monster Gallery.

Harry sniffed and a foul stench reached his nostrils, a mixture of old socks and the kind of public toilet no one seems to clean.

And then they heard it – a low grunting and the shuffling footfalls of gigantic feet. Ron pointed: at the end of a passage to the left, something huge was moving towards them. They shrank into the shadows and watched as it emerged into a patch of moonlight. It was a horrible sight. Twelve feet tall, its skin was a dull, granite grey, its great lumpy body like a boulder with its small bald head perched on top like a coconut. It had short legs thick as tree trunks with flat, horny feet. The smell coming from it was incredible. It was holding a huge wooden club, which dragged along the floor because its arms were so long.
The troll stopped next to a doorway and peered inside. It waggled its long ears, making up its tiny mind, then slouched slowly into the room.
– J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

Design work on the Mountain Troll for Philosopher’s Stone was initiated by Robert Bliss and Paul Catling. “Stuart Craig’s designers were well cast to the film,” said visual effects supervisor Rob Legato. “They were great at coming up with dark and fantastic creatures. The Troll was both of these. We wanted him to be ferocious, but we also wanted him to convey a somewhat dopey look with his eyes, so you hate him and don’t hate him at the same time.”

Robert Bliss’s Troll design.

Bliss and Catlin’s illustrations were translated into maquettes by Nick Dudman’s creature effects team. White resin castings were used to be digitally scanned, and a fully painted model was built for reference.

Due to its stature and proportions, the Troll had to be brought to the screen as a digital creation, which was combined with a series of practical insert models: a pneumatic rig devised by John Richardson swung the Troll’s club. Nick Dudman’s team also built a pair of silicone ‘Troll trousers’ representing its legs, worn by former rugby player Martin Bayfield during filming.

A full-size Troll animatronic representing the creature after it has been knocked unconscious was instead built by Jim Henson’s Character Shop. Shop supervisor Jamie Courtier explained: “we scaled up the maquette and sculpted our twelve-foot-tall Troll in clay. The sculpting was led by Jan Whittaker and Steve Jolley. Our Troll was only seen laying down, but we sculpted him upright so he could be shot standing if Chris Columbus wanted.” The Troll’s skin was moulded in silicone. “The natural displacement of the silicone made the flesh sag naturally either way,” Courtier continues. “Kenny Wilson led molding to make the silicone skin. Graham High and Marie Fraser then fabricated an internal structure and gave him a state-of-the-art animatronic head, built by Adrian Parish and Dan Burnett, which connected to the Henson Performance Control System. This gave the Troll face and finger movement, which Chris requested, so he could twitch and show signs of life that would scare you into thinking he might wake up.”

The Henson Troll was used as reference by the Sony Imageworks team to bring the digital version of the character to life. The visual effects sequences were overseen by CG supervisor David Smith. “As soon as Henson’s had an eyeball or a piece of skin,” said visual effects supervisor Jim Berney, “they’d send it to us for our modelers and shader-writers to play with. Luckily, we did not have to match theirs spot-on, so we built a tremendous amount of detail into our digital version, with wrinkles and polyps and big, thorny warts.”

With medical photographs used as reference, Smith endowed the Troll’s skin with a layer of carbuncles and grime, adding dirt to wrinkles and warts in order for light to interact with subdermal layers. Hair was also added in certain spots of the body. “We added little spotty tufts up on top of his head,” Smith said, “gave him ear hair, armpit hair and a treasure trail going down his belly. No one really knew what he would be wearing. At one point he was going to have a vest, which developed into this complex patchwork with big stitching; but he ended up with a simple loincloth, so Todd Pilger but together a nice simulation to make the belly giggle.”

The Troll was animated by Todd Wilderman and a team of five animators. “The Troll was a walking bulldozer,” said Eric Armstrong, part of the crew. “Knocking down a wall was like knocking over dominoes to him. We imagined he was like a four-year-old. Everything is very basic in the way a child that age reacts — either they’re very happy, or they’re very sad — and that’s just how the Troll was, simple but extreme.”

For the scenes involving Harry interacting with the Troll, a practical approach with a green screen shape used by Radcliffe was first devised, but ultimately discarded in favour of a fully digital version.

For more pictures of the Troll, visit the Monster Gallery.

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A cluster of crude stone dwellings stained with algae loomed suddenly out of the gloom on all sides. Here and there at the dark windows, Harry saw faces… faces that bore no resemblance at all to the painting of the mermaid in the prefects’ bathroom…

The merpeople had grayish skin and long, wild, dark green hair. Their eyes were yellow, as were their broken teeth, and they wore thick ropes of pebbles around their necks. They leered at Harry as he swam past; one or two of them emerged from their caves to watch him better, their powerful, silver fish tails beating the water, spears clutched in their hands.
-J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

In the Harry Potter novels, the Merpeople and the Grindylows are not the only denizens of the Hogwarts lake — a giant squid also resides there, but remained excised from all films. The creature was briefly considered for a cameo in Prisoner of Azkaban (during the Buckbeak flight sequence), being portrayed in early storyboards for the sequence — but was cut from the final version of the film for reasons of time and budget.

Compared to the Goblet of Fire novel, the second task scene in the film adaptation excises some details that showcased the culture of the Merpeople — such as large sculptures — and dialogue sequences, instead opting for a quicker-paced scene. Designwise, the Merpeople were assigned to Adam Brockbank: they went through several different iterations — some remaining close to the novel description and others leaning more towards animal-like anatomy. The latter direction was maintained as the design process progressed: the filmmakers opted for creatures that would organically meld fish and human qualities, instead of a human torso with a fish tail. Sturgeons served as key reference for the designs — for textures, scales, and proportions. Various options were considered for the Merpeople’s hair — including octopus-like tentacles. The final design featured sea anemone-like hair and humanoid anatomy with fish-like facial connotations, as well as a scythe-like fish tail based on tunas.

With the final design approved, it was sculpted into a series of reference maquettes that served as the base for the creation of the digital model that Framestore CFC used to bring the creatures to life. Creation of the Merpeople and Grindylows was supervised by David Lomax. The translucent, slimy appearance of their skin was resolved with the development of specific shaders that endowed them with subsurface scattering. “This aspect of the creatures was tricky to pull off as something slimy no longer looks slimy underwater,” said Tim Webber, Framestore FX supervisor.

The Merpeople were animated in what was one of the first examples of a wholly computer-generated underwater environment. The creatures’ bodies were animated manually, whereas the hair and the fins were animated procedurally. “We added a lot of control tools to make sure the hair didn’t flatten whenever a mermaid was swimming fast,” Webber said. “It included generating extra turbulence to keep it looking snake-like and sinuous.”

Harry twisted his body around and saw a grindylow, a small, horned water demon, poking out of the weed, its long fingers clutched tightly around Harry’s leg, its pointed fangs bared – Harry stuck his webbed hand quickly inside his robes and fumbled for his wand. By the time he had grasped it, two more grindylows had risen out of the weed, had seized handfuls of Harry’s robes, and were attempting to drag him down.

The notion of Grindylows stems from Northern English lore; Rowling’s description was very vague, offering the creature designers of the film production wide creative freedom in their portrayal. Design ideas were most varied, ranging from frog-like to angler-like iterations, imp-like or goblin-like bodies, and variations with hybrid anatomy — torsos merged with fish-like tails, or tentacles. Eventually, the direction taken by the design team was the concept of “a cross between a nasty child and an octopus,” with a vaguely humanoid head (complete with piranha-like rows of teeth), torso and arms, ending in a lower body with a proportionally large paunch and an array of cephalopod-like tentacles.

Once the design was selected, it was translated into three-dimensional fiberglass maquettes, which were then scanned to begin the creation of the digital model. Single Grindylows were animated manually, with challenges offered by their unique anatomy. Webbe related: “each Grindylow had an overall ‘squirty’ movement. We controlled each tentacle using dynamics and muscle systems to make it feel fleshy. It was a rigging challenge because the top half had a skeleton, but the bottom half could squash and stretch.”

The Grindylow digital model.

Certain sequences called for swarms of the creatures attacking Harry; to that end, Framestore artists used the in-house ‘Choreographer’ animation system, which enabled them to create the frenzied flocking motion of the Grindylow swarms. Webber explained: “we couldn’t use a crowd system because we wanted control over each creature; and so we hand-animated each character in Choreographer. We broke Grindylows into layers to wrap them around Harry in the composite, then rendered them mostly in one go.”

For more pictures of the Merpeople and Grindylows, visit the Monster Gallery.

A gigantic dragon was tethered to the ground in front of them, barring access to four or five of the deepest vaults in the place. The beast’s scales had turned pale and flaky during its long incarceration under the ground, its eyes were milkily pink; both rear legs bore heavy cuffs from which chains led to enormous pegs driven deep into the rocky floor. Its great spiked wings, folded close to its body, would have filled the chamber if it spread them, and when it turned its ugly head toward them, it roared with a noise that made the rock tremble, opened its mouth, and spat a jet of fire that sent them running back up the passageway.

-J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

The Ukrainian Ironbelly in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (whose species name was actually not mentioned in the novel) was a violently mistreated, unhealthy animal, subject to imprisonment and torture by the goblins. The concept of animal abuse applied to a dragon became the key element of its characterization in the film adaptation, on both a design and animation level. Visual effects supervisor Tim Burke related: “this dragon had been underground all its life and very badly treated. It was important for David Yates that this came across in the dragon’s character, so the audience would have empathy for it.” Visual effects supervisor David Vickery further elaborated: “Tim Burke envisaged the creature as an emaciated, malnourished, mistreated wild animal and David Yates insistent that the audience needed to emote with the creature – to sympathise with it but at the same time be terrified of it.” In another interview, he also added: “it was always supposed to be a really tortured, malnourished, emaciated dragon. We even had to look at some horrible RSPCA photos of dogs that had been mistreated for reference, which had a certain look in their eye.”

Early concept keyframe by Karl Simon.

Concept iterations of the dragon were handled by several artists, with the bulk of the design established by Paul Catling. The concepts initially explored a variety of different looks, but eventually dialled back to a more faithful rendition of the novel description; what shifted from version to version were the animals used as the base for the anatomy of the head and other body parts, as well as the texture and size of the scaly covering. Eventually, the design steered towards an elegant configuration with a crown of thin horns on the head and a long, beaked snout.

Ironbelly concept by Paul Catling.

The art department then supplied the concept art work to Double Negative, whose crew dedicated to the creation of the dragon was ultimately composed by up to 100 members — lighting artists, creature effects technical directors, compositors, matchmove and rotoscope artists. The dragon was actually one of the first portions of the digital effects to begin being worked on. “Some of the first concept images we were given for The Deathly Hallows Part II were of the dragon,” said visual effects supervisor David Vickery. “They depicted an emaciated yet feral looking animal, sprawling in a dank and cavernous environment.” Conceptual designers Kristin Stolpe and Andy Warren further developed the dragon design, crafting a series of models in Maya, Photoshop texture studies and Mudbox sculptures using the art department concepts as reference. “At this early stage the creature went through a lot of changes,” Vickery related. “We designed shackles, muzzles and harnesses that could be used to restrain the creature and painted high res textures to show how the dragon could be wounded, scarred and disfigured. There were hundreds of subtle tweaks and variations made to the design of the creature during this phase.”

Particular attention was given to elaborating on the texture, quality and colour of the dragon’s skin. “We spent a long time on the getting the right color of the skin,” Vickery said. “They didn’t want it to be a pink dragon, or a blue dragon. It was amazing how sensitive everyone was to the tinniest little hint in the skin. The other thing was making it tortured and emaciated enough that you felt sorry for it. David Yates was adamant that it not be a creature you look at and be disgusted by – you were supposed to emote with it. You had to look at it and feel simultaneously terrified and sorry for it.A number of body wound and disfiguration designs were also explored and added to the skin to highlight the unhealthy state of the dragon.

Stolpe and Warren’s renderings were used as the base reference for the construction of the digital dragon, handled by Rick Leary’s modelling team. As the dragon had only been visualized in two-dimensional renderings up to that point, it was crucial to make its appearance adapt to scrutinization from all angles. “Individual still images often give you a false impression of an object’s shape,” Vickery related. “When you look around that same object in 3D it suddenly looks very different. We wanted to get the creature modelled as soon as possible to avoid this and really start to understand its from from all angles.”

Lead character rigger Tom Bracht and creature lead Gavin Harrison were responsible for the simulation of the dragon’s emaciated quality, achieved with a combination of layered dynamic simulations (which also included a vein layer) and a muscle rig system built in Double Negative’s rigging tools. “We had creature technical directors scripting lots of new pipeline tools to handle the many layers of cloth, muscle, bone, skin and tendon simulations we knew would be required to create a convincing animal,” Vickery said. He also explained that “we had to subdivide parts of the creature rig so that we could employ different simulation techniques on separate parts of the dragon’s anatomy. We utilized the dragon’s skeleton as a sculpt deformer. As the dragon breathed, her ribs would heave, her muscles and tendons would flex, and her skin would slide over different portions of her body to different degrees.”

Vickery explained the muscle and skin simulation process in detail: “[the animators] had some very finite controls over really small details. Aside from your usual rig elements, they had wobble controls for loose skin underneath the neck, they had fairly accurate controls for positioning the panels of the wings and the cloth between the wings. Chris Lentz, the animation supervisor, and his team would go through and do that and then it got passed over to the dynamics team. The first thing they would do is simulate the muscles. We had built an accurate skeleton of the dragon, which had a fairly simple muscle geometry built in. We then had a Dneg plug-in called Beefcake which allowed the geometry of the muscles to then deform and inflate or deflate the exterior of the skin. We then had a displaced set of tendons across the neck, the shoulders and the hips, which were controlled by the effects guys and animated to fire on and off all the time. They also added in controls for veins – essentially where they start moving underneath the skin. On top of that we added in skin-sliding over the top of the bones and muscles. We painted maps to allow the skin to slide in some areas and not others. Then we added the cloth simulation for the wings. Plus we had all the chain simulations around the neck and shackles for the feet. And of course we then went through a whole lighting and rendering process.”

Burke provided Double Negative animation supervisor Chris Lentz with reference footage of rescue dogs and Russian circus bears. Much like its design, the behaviour of the Ironbelly had to reflect its condition of an abused animal. “The body language was so apparent in the way these animals held themselves,” Burke said, “their posture, and their eyes. We showed that in the dragon when the goblins use the clankers. This creature has been taught to fear the noise — a bit like Pavlov’s dog — and so it’s cowering and terrified.”

Scenes with Harry and his friends on the dragon’s back were the biggest technical challenge relating to the dragon effects. “Getting the lead characters to sit convincingly on the back of the dragon was a massive technical challenge for us,” Vickery commented. “We really wanted to avoid the slow grinding mechanical feel that you often get when humans have to ride or interact with large imaginary creatures.” John Richardson’s mechanical effects team devised a practical interactive section of the dragon’s back that the actors could ride on a motion control base. Vickery recalled: “we provided John Richardson with our finished Maya model of the dragon and he used this to CNC-machine a 1:1 scale 12 foot sculpt of part of the dragon’s back. Nick Dudman then used this to create a flexible foam latex skin that would form the creature’s hide whilst John Richardson built a mechanical rig to control its movement. The rig had pneumatic rams to drive the dragon’s shoulders up and down, twist the neck and spine in three places and lift the top of the tail.”

The rig was controlled by digital animation supplied by the animators. “John detailed the components of his rig and we built our own digital version of it and constrained it to our 3D dragon in Maya,” Vickery said. “Our Lead creature technical directors Gavin Harrison and Stuart Love wrote a series of tools that allowed us to extract our previs animation and use the data to drive John’s mechanical rig. We could animate the creature in Maya, export the data and see the mechanical rig do the same movements on set but this time with the actors on the back!!”

The practical limits of the rig dictated specific shooting adaptations, such as lower frame rates for certain shots. Vickery said: “the rig itself had a pretty good range of motion but was so heavy that it was never going to achieve the speeds we were seeing in our dragon previs. We had to adapt our shooting methods for each shot to make sure we got the most out of the rig. Some shots were filmed at 18fps and re-sped to make the dragon back appear to move faster.” The rig was then replaced with the digital dragon, composited into the shots. Certain sequences also implemented digital doubles of the actors.

At least we’ve still got Bogrod…

…that was unfortunate.

For scenes where the Ironbelly breathes fire, Double Negative effects animation supervisor Alexander Seaman used footage of John Richardson’s pyrotechnic effects that had been devised for the Hungarian Horntail as reference, and created digital fluid flame effects.

The dragon finally breaks free from imprisonment, and rests perched on top of the buildings — breathing slowly. “David Yates wanted this to be the first time we could really scrutinize the beauty of the dragon restored to her former glory,” Vickery related. “There was some incredible work in the skin and muscle deformers. As it spreads its wings, we used Maya nCloth simulations to create sag and dynamic flutter in the wing membranes. We broke that into separate meshes because it was so high-resolution, then ran nCloth on the fingers and the wing tips and reintegrated that into the creature body.” Large flying birds such as Albatrosses were used as reference for both the stumbling take-off and the flight scenes.

Goblins and wizards shrieked and ran for cover, and finally the dragon had room to stretch its wings: Turning its horned head toward the cool outside air it could smell beyond the entrance, it took off, and with Harry, Ron, and Hermione still clinging to its back, it forced its way through the metal doors, leaving them buckled and hanging from their hinges, as it staggered into Diagon Alley and launched itself into the sky.

For more pictures of the Ukrainian Ironbelly, visit the Monster Gallery.