Her lemur-like tail got replaced by a more bunny like tail, and her head ended up becoming drop shaped, which helped support her femininity and distinguish her silhouette, together with other features like her wide pelvis and long eyelashes.Īs in many boy-meets-dragon stories, Ben’s character plays an essential role. One of the main challenges were to make Sorrel feel like an appealing, good-hearted character, despite her natural spite and skeptical attitude. She was originally sketched accordingly, but as her design evolved the cat featured were reduced, and became a bit more fox-like. In the novel she was described as a cat-like humanoid. Sorrel’s design went through a few rounds before it got to its final state. Throughout the adventure she learns that humans can also be good, and ends up changing her ground beliefs about them. This position is compromised when Ben joins the group, which also confronts her with her inherited prejudice mindset against humans. Sorrel is Firedrake’s loyal friend, and she sees herself as his protector. Her character traits and personality never drift away much from how she is described in the novel. His lower body was designed according to the anatomy of a lion cub, to convey majesty and a future leader.Īs the female lead Sorrel plays an important role in the story. Classic dragon features like sharp teeth, spiky horns, and other monster-like features were strongly reduced in order to reflect his friendly, nonthreatening nature.

His base design as a winged quadruped was partially based on Cornelia Funke’s original illustrations, but his final design ended up drifting into a more naive and likable direction, after it became clear that he is going to appear as a younger character in the film. The decision to make him a younger character in the film was made in order to achieve a group dynamic between him, Ben and Sorrel, that would more resemble classic films like “Stand by me”, “Goonies” and many more, where a group of kids go out to a secret adventure, without the knowledge of the grown-ups around them. However, in the book he is featured as a mature dragon. In the novel as well as in the film, his motivation is primal and is the driving force behind the plot. His good heart, courage and sense of responsibility drives him to go out on a dangerous quest around the world to find the Rim of Heaven, the place where all dragons could live in safety. The character design team created altogether about 80 character turntables and roughly 100 props.įiredrake is the hero of the story. The final stage of the character design process was the creation of 3D Maquetts, sculpted by Lumatic's head of modeling, Michael Herm, in close collaboration with Tomer and Thorsten. Detailed poses and expression sheets were created for each character, as well as color concepts and prop designs. The character design process began in parallel to script development and overall production design.Īlmost all the characters were based on conceptual designs by director Tomer Eshed, and were further developed by the character design team, supervised by Thorsten Kiecker. After the conceptual design was done, maquettes were sculpted, mostly by the head of modeling Michel Herm, and delivered for final modeling/rigging in Belgium. The duration of the design process varied from character to character, and depended on the character’s role in the script. Most of the characters were pre-sketched by director Tomer Eshed and were subsequently handed over to the character design department, led by Thorsten Kiecker, for further development. Due to the large number of characters and sets, we had to develop efficient methods to cover the workload within the time- and budget-frames. The character design was a particular challenge in the production.

Dragon rider firedrake