Dragonheart Storyboard Sequence

In the 1996 film Dragonheart the dragon-slaying knight Bowen and the last remaining dragon Draco team up to defeat the evil king Einon. They first meet because the knight is hunting the dragon, but after a rocky start they come to an alliance of sorts. As part of their deal the dragon attacks a village, the knight pretends to kill the dragon and he gets paid for his trouble. 

These storyboards are for the scene that happens directly after this. The knight sits down to count his coin, happy that things are going his way. But the dragon has some thoughts on the ethics of their little scam. 

Storyboarding this specific scene is an assignment that they give out at Pixar during the story internship. The main objective of the exercise is to do a scene where the two characters are very different in size. Something that is a lot more challenging than it sounds.

I always wanted to do that Pixar internship, I applied every year when I was in school, but I wasn’t accepted. That doesn’t mean I can’t do the assignments of course! 

I first did a version of this scene in 2015. Initially I was really happy with the work I did, but too quickly I began to see that my sequence had a lot of problems. Ever since then I wanted to do a better take, but although I started on it many times I never got around to really doing it. 

Last December I finally found the time to do this. I sent out my boards to some of my storyboarding friends and got some very valuable feedback. So then I went back and did the whole thing one more time, only one or two shots from that first version can be found in this pass.  

You know what they say, storyboarding is really storyREboarding... 

I chose to change the time and location of this scene. In the given script pages, it is set during the day as the knight rides though a hilly landscape and the dragon swoops in. I moved the action to a church ruin, at night. For me the ruined church represents Bowen’s crumbled believes and the graveyard outside underlines the theme of death that the dragon struggles with. In the film the stars are believed to be the souls of dragons that have passed away so I also wanted the starry sky to be present throughout. 

Click on the first image to view the whole sequence in the lightbox picture viewer. You can move through it by clicking the panels, or by using the arrow keys on your keyboard.