The concept for the promo was based on the opening passage of ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. The brief was to reflect the “best of times” and “worst of times” of the City by bringing to life the City Dragon (the symbol of the city of London), located just outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London.

The first challenge was to accurately model a CGI version of the chosen statue from reference photographs so that it would seamlessly cut with real shots of the statue.
HDR (high dynamic range) light probe images were gathered on the shoot at each location that the dragon was going to appear in, this allowed the lighting and reflections of the actual environment to be accurately and realistically recreated. The dark, worn metal surface of the statue was also accurately recreated, along with a range of subtle secondary effects such as bread crumbs, smoke, flames and litter that the dragon disturbs. The dragon needed to stay looking fairly rigid and metallic rather than reptilian so the link to the statue was maintained.

Smoke, fire and breath were achieved as full digital effects with fluid simulation software. Softimage XSI was used to animate, Brazil to render and Fusion to composite. From start to finish it took 5 weeks to complete.