DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES 2023, dir. Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Dale
LIVE ACTION PRACTICAL EFFECTS TABAXI
I recently watched this and was blown away by this entire scene. This was a one off pair of characters with no names and no lines. They exist entirely to demonstrate the paladin being a Good Person by saving a baby. After he does this, he goes and gives money to a beggar - who is a dragonborn. He is one of two dragonborn in the film, and neither one needs to be a dragonborn. It would have been so easy to make the tabaxi and dragonborn characters humans, or slap some ears on them to make them elves, and they didn’t. They really went out of their way, building practical effects for the tabaxi and dragonborn when they didn’t need to… this is a movie that loves its source material and it also loves being a movie. People working on this movie cared.
I really missed that.
#and the birdman#don’t forget the birdman YES! AND the birdman! Now the birdman couldn’t be human because Plot Reasons demanded he have wings, but he was also almost entirely practical effects!
This movie was so much fun, loved how lovingly made all of the creatures and effects were
I love Jarnathan
Oh! Oh, I have the artbook for this movie!!
Can confirm, Jarnathan (the aarakocra, or “birdman” as some people here call him) was all practical effects! His face was an animatronic mask, his feet were articulated high-heel shoes, and he had three fully-functional talon-like fingers on each hand too!
The directors Daley and Goldstein could have made him entirely CG, but they instead went to Legacy Effects, who specialize in prosthetics and animatronics and puppeteering, because they REALLY wanted Jarnathan to look and feel authentic.
According to the artbook, the wings on him were a backpack, a self-contained mechanism that weighed around 60 pounds. The wings extended open to about ten or eleven feet!
I love this movie! :D
@dangerously-human
In the same line, if you haven’t seen Star Trek: Beyond you’re missing out! They created 50 alien races to include in the movie, and all of them were made using practical effects! None of them are main characters, they could just do what the previous 2 movies did and make all the aliens identical to humans.
But they DIDN’T. And instead of humans with pointy ear or boring GCI, we got this:
LOOK AT THIS MASTERPIECE IN MAKE UP AND PROP MAKING!!
By the way, the head makeup artist and designer for this movie is Joel Harlow, who, among many other things, was also responsible for this masterpiece.
You can - and should - check his work out on his website.
Puppetiering and Make-up-artistry
