‘Concerning Dragons’ slays Tolkien fans

Published On Tue 6 May 2014 by Grant Hill

An animation created by postgraduate students at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD) telling the backstory of one of the characters in The Hobbit has proved a hit with fans across the globe.

Eleven students on the MSc Animation & Visualisation programme recently worked on a project in which they explored the mysterious origins of the dragons of Middle Earth. The resulting video has been viewed almost 20,000 times in Vimeo and has earned praise from The Tolkein Society.

The brief was set by the award-winning Axis Animation, who create animations for some of the world’s leading names in commercials, games, broadcast and film. The team at Axis challenged the students to create a 30-second, visually striking and original animation about Smaug, the dragon in  J. R. R. Tolkien's 1937 novel The Hobbit described as "a most specially greedy, strong and wicked worm".

The brief included key words such as epic, legendary, awe-inspiring and mythic, and the team spent 13 weeks working on the ‘Concerning Dragons’ film before presenting the results to Axis Animation's production staff at their state of the art studio space at Skypark in Glasgow.

Course Director Phillip Vaughan said, "I was really impressed with the way our students tackled this project, taking a very professional approach to the production, in a limited timescale, and they presented to Axis in a very articulate way.

“This project provides students with experience of managing relationships in teams and developing transferable skills while working on a professional project. They have worked together to produce an animation that really impressed the team at Axis."

The video has also been added to The Tolkien Society’s website, and Chairman Shaun Gunner also praised the students’ effort, calling it “an absolutely wonderful homage to Tolkien's works”.

‘Concerning Dragons’ can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33nogpfhYFQ#t=19.

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