Cumberbandywag recently spoke of his chat with Peter Jackson upon being offered the part of Smaug: “Fantastic. Can I do some motion capture?’ And he said we wouldn’t really need it. And I told him, ‘Yeah, I know, but it would really help me to characterize him.’ And he said OK. And it really helped.” But, as everyone knows, the budget was instead eventually allocated to the following:
Pictures from his mo-cap sesh:
Cumberbum spoke at the Hobbit premiere of how he “dragon’d it up” with his prep work; which included going to the zoo to watch Komodo dragons, slithering around on his stomach and basically just committing like champ:
Visual Effects Supervisor Joe Letteri about his work on ‘The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug‘ and the issues they faced trying to make a believable character out of a dragon with a ‘head the size of a bus’:
via Huffington Post and AV Club and moviefone
