So, we always knew we wanted to do Smaug, and more than one. we had to wait till DoS was done and in cinemas before we could get full access to the finished Dragon reference from Weta Digital - such was the secrecy surrounding this character and also acknnowledges that Weta Digital and Peter Jackson were tweaking and improving him right up until the last minute.
We identified very early on that we would want a high end 'prestige' version that would be limited in edition as well as a more accessible version that would be considerably smaller and more widely available. For the smaller version we would need to keep the casting process simple, so it was suggested that we might either curl him around some rock or embed him in his pile of gold. We have already gone the rock route a lot with other pieces, and Smaug in his gold was so iconic that it only made sense to go that way for the 'Smauglet' as you guys have so adorably tagged him, so then we had to think about how to make sure the prestige version of Smaug was significantly different.
One of the big problems with Smaug is the fact that he is so long and snake-like, with huge (read potentially breakable) wings, thin spines, projecting scales and a tiny head relative to his body size. These are all tricky propositions when we're talking about polystone. To get around these issues, we realized that we probably couldn't depict him with his wings spread. That's not to say we couldn't do a statue like that one day, but with this statue it would have made him so large and fragile, while still having a tiny head, that we felt it would be a problem for people to display and likely cause us breakability issues. The most interesting thing about Smaug is his awesome head design, not his wing membranes, so we decided we needed to find a way to minimize his wing surface area, strengthen these potentially very thin parts of the sculpture and bring the focus back to his head. Curling his tail in would also greatly reduce the footprint of the piece, so everything pointed towards having an at least partially coiled, terrestrial pose of some kind, with his wings partially folded, creating a tent-like form that would also be a great backdrop for his snarling jaws and piercing eyes, when viewed on the shelf.
Of the scenes in the second film involving Smaug, we felt Bilbo's conversation with Smaug in his lair was the iconic scene to try and evoke, so that meant putting him in an Erebor environment with gold. The nice thing about that was the gold and potential green of the architecture would contrast nicely with his red scales, so that seemed like the right idea. Having him standing on/in gold also meant we could embed his claws and tail to some degree, which would again help us out as far as minimizing breakage risk and also give the piece a good, solid grounding for the statue.
For a while we looked at having a pillar of carved green marble somewhere in the piece, possibly for Smaug to be leaning against or coming around. It gave the piece a nice pyramid shape without too closely evoking the John Howe Smaug the Golden statue, but the more we pushed around the concept, the more we felt the pillar was distracting and added unnecessary mass, so we elected to ditch it and go with a pose in which Smaug looks like he has just risen up out of the gold and was furiously casting about to find something - presumably Bilbo, though we left that slightly ambiguous. We briefly toyed with the notion of including Bilbo in the piece, but he would have been soooo tiny that we decided to leave him out and concentrate just on the Dragon himself.
Weta Digital supplied us with the basic form of the Dragon from their digital model, but we posed him and completely redetailed him from scratch in Z-Brush, a process that took weeks! There were numerous progress reviews and debates as we proceeded, involving several sculptors (Gary Hunt, Lindsey Crummet, Andrew Baker, Greg Tozer, and I am bound to be forgetting someone), Richard and our entire product development team, while we honed the exact pose and various details. We also printed test elements to check that the scales were reading well and would have enough relief to hold multiple passes of paint without becoming smoothed over. Our friends at Weta Digital gave their opinions and notes so that we made sure we were keeping him on model and accurately interpreting their vision of the character. Once all that was resolved we submitted him for approval to WB, and were very pleased that he came back from the studio and Peter's office with the big tick and no changes necessary!
Around this time we milled some basic polystyrene stand-ins at various sizes and stuck them on bases to debate the exact size we would be producing him. Everyone agreed that we needed to make him big and that he justified a new, much larger base being specially tooled up rather than the Rivendell sized base he had originally been designed for. 'Go big or go home,' was my mantra on this piece. The new one was significantly larger and allowed us to scale our statue up as well, making him much more imposing and impressive. Smaug is now the first piece to use our newest, largest ever oval base.
The digital sculpt was 3D printed at a very high level of detail and then went through an extensive reassembly and clean-up process on David and Leonard's desks. We also came to realize at about this time that the stylistic resolution of the gold, as we had done it, wasn't working. It really just looked like sand. We appreciated, with our deadline fast approaching, that the base needed to be entirely resculpted, practically, and Dave and Leonard threw themselves into it, coming up with a very effective process for creating piles of gold coins, supplemented with other items of treasure. The coins were a bit of a cheat, as in order to get them to read as anything other than sand at this scale, we had to oversize and 'cartoonize' them a bit, so in reality they are probably closer to dinner plate or even car tyre scale in the final collectible, but we felt this was an acceptable compromise in order to get them to read like coins and not a giant gold bean bag for our Dragon to lounge on! I think the final result was very effective. yeah, they're a bit out of scale, but they look awesome! Dave and Leonard kicked a$$. Leonard even added little extra gold coins on Smaug's wings.
Once we had our masters completed, Smaug was painted by the talented Dordi Moen and Sourisak Chanpaseuth, veterans of our paintshop department, who, working from renders and screen shots, and in consultation with Gino Acevedo from Digi, came up with the final paint scheme, just in time to be approved by the studio and bundled into a custom crate for Richard to hand carry to San Diego Comic Con for you all to see!
