Tania Richard, Ken Beauchamp, Michael Dharney, Jason Madigan, and Michael Goddard from ILM’s Vancouver studio talk to Mark Newbold about how they created the Dragonsnake in The Mandalorian and Grogu.
One of the most fearsome, lethal, and powerful creatures in the Star Wars galactic menagerie, the Dragonsnake arrives on-screen in The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026) with a splash. Its coiled fury and venomous fangs almost end Din Djarin as he battles the creature in the pit beneath the Hutt Twins’ audience chamber on Nal Hutta.
However, it’s not the first time we’ve seen a Dragonsnake on-screen. In Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), R2-D2 is swallowed and quickly regurgitated by a Dagobah Dragonsnake, while Star Wars: The Clone Wars episode ‘The Hunt For Ziro’ (2010) gave us another species of Dragonsnake, one that attacks Obi-Wan Kenobi and pays dearly for that ill-advised decision.
With a lineage that reaches back over 45 years and a reputation for being an untameable beast, ILM was tasked with the job of bringing this unstoppable reptile to life in Jon Favreau’s Mandalorian adventure, and ILM.com had the pleasure of sitting down with five members of the team behind its digital creation to discuss the Dragonsnake’s journey from imagination to reality.
Drawing Venom
“We had beautiful artwork from [production designer] Doug Chiang’s team to follow,” explains associate visual effects supervisor Tania Richard, “and once we got into shot work, that’s when our Vancouver team owned the sequences. The Dragonsnake was Vancouver’s main asset, and much of it was developed closely with [production visual effects supervisor] John Knoll and the San Francisco team early on during the project.”
“This is not your average garter snake,” says associate animation supervisor Michael Dharney. But where does ILM look for inspiration when building a snake the length of a football field? “We used real reference with snakes of varying scale to lock down both physicality and behavioral elements,” Dharney notes, “which was really helpful to ground us. There can be a temptation to break away from the basics when you’re working at this massive scale. That size was a piece of the puzzle that we constantly needed to be conscious of.”
Scale was a primary consideration, but the creature needed to retain its snake-like qualities, as Dharney continues. “The twitchy nature of a real snake needed to be conveyed, while maintaining convincing weight and mass for our creature. We looked at how larger creatures move, the momentum they carry, and how their mass restricts their movement.”
Lighting department supervisor Michael Goddard agrees, revealing a healthy dash of movie magic. “The animation team added extra coils to create different shapes and profiles in the water as it broke the surface,” he explains, “and those additional features really help define the water around the snake. We pushed different areas of the simulation around to create the feel of a much larger creature in the water. I don’t know if it’s spoiling the secret sauce,” Goddard adds with a smile, “but if you look under the hood, you’ll see all sorts of weird stuff going on.”
Lead digital artist Jason Madigan notes that “It was an interesting challenge because it’s a big snake, but the pit isn’t a very big room, so there were challenges with trying to get so much activity and action with such a large creature in such a small space and still have it make sense.”
“The trickiest part was managing the sheer scale of that massive creature in the relatively small pit environment,” adds Dharney. “It’s so large that we never see the end of it, yet it coils around endlessly and thrashes around in a very destructive manner, so we had to be very creative about how we maneuvered through the pit, making sure the Dragonsnake felt comfortable in its own environment while keeping the energy level high.”
There was also another element for the team to factor in, one that throws back to ILM creatures of the past. “Beyond this,” explains Dharney, “we needed to keep in mind that our director wanted the audience to believe that the Dragonsnake could have been conceived in the creature shop. That gave us the opportunity to lean on the aspects that animatronics would bring to the table, had this creature been sculpted around a robotic armature.”
The Snake Pit
While the Dragonsnake is the primary focus of the team’s work, the pit where the snake resides is every bit as important as Tania Richard explains. “We built the full environment, but we also had to modify how we rendered the background in relation to the Dragonsnake in situations where realistically the snake would intersect with the wall. The environment team came up with some clever tricks to allow the animation team the freedom to pose and move the snake as they needed. [Department supervisor] Andy Proctor led the team in the build, and we had our beautiful designs from Doug Chiang’s team, so we had a good sense of what it would look like above water.”
“They shot a lot on set, but it wasn’t always exactly what they wanted, and from a comp perspective, being underwater is always a challenge,” says Madigan. “We had so many different circumstances throughout the underwater sequences. It’s above, below, above, below, above, below, and the plates were quite different.”
ILM is world-renowned for rising to such challenges. “The activity was changing, the location was changing, you’ve got the snake wrapped around Mando, and the snake head was filmed with a large on-set animatronic,” Madigan continues. “We couldn’t use that, so we had to remove it.” Additionally, the water itself became a key focus of their work. “Each shot had to be approached differently. It wasn’t something we could set up and say, ‘This is how we do the underwater stuff.’ Every shot was a puzzle to decipher.”
Bringing these elements together meant some creative thinking was required, as Goddard explains. “The water was murky when we looked down from above, but from a storytelling standpoint, you need to ‘de-murk’ it when you’re underwater, otherwise you can’t see anything, so a lot of the underwater roots weren’t necessary for the above water shots. That gave the animation team the freedom to do whatever they wanted to with the snake and not worry about it crashing through stuff, because you couldn’t see it.”
The murky water was also laced with some additional texture. “We had a comp treatment that added a bit of surface texture and dirt, which was pretty simple, but it only worked in certain circumstances,” says Madigan, “but the more you have to play with underwater, the easier it’s going to be to sell it as actually having content in the water volume between you and other objects. The amount of layered murky components that we put in some of those underwater shots was pretty high.”
Hiss and Boo
As the sequence progresses, the game of cat and mouse between the Dragonsnake and Mando intensifies as Din Djarin has to not only avoid the huge reptile but also mind his footing, a tricky task to conceptualize and execute.
“One of the trickiest things to figure out was Mando as he’s trying to navigate the root system just under the surface of the water,” explains Richard. “We can’t necessarily see that from above, but once we go below, we need to be able to sell enough root structure that he’s able to walk on without completely obscuring the view, so finding the balance of just the right amount of roots under the water to sell that story point required a bit of exploration. Andy Proctor’s team essentially extended the set, but there were also some additional roots added for interaction with the snake.” With the Dragonsnake truly riled up, the pit, the water, and the snake interact in a dynamic fashion. “You see the Dragonsnake plowing into the root wall and snapping the roots,” adds Richard, “so we had to strategically figure out how to add that to the plate environment without breaking continuity.”
“A lot of our reference was from above the water,” says department supervisor Ken Beauchamp. “We had steam coming from the surface and interacting with the Dragonsnake so they could layer in some depth and add to the murkiness to make it look more like a dirty swamp. When we got underwater, the effects team were generating multiple layers of interactive bubbles, and we were referencing a couple of shots, like Mando diving underwater, which were fantastically filmed on set. They looked beautiful, so we took that and created all these layers of bubbles wrapping around his arm, his legs, his back, and we had aeration bubbles that were coming up from the ground, that were moving around roots, and interacting with everything. We had rays of light coming down and peeking through, so you got a sense that there was something above. Jason and his team had to then layer in all these elements together.”
Deep down in a water-filled pit with limited light, the Dragonsnake waits for its next meal, but as the audience watches, it’s clear that the only light is cast down from the small holes in the floor of the audience chamber. As the floor opens and the Hutts look down from their dais, light pours in, a task that fell to Michael Goddard and his team.
“We start with a key light that matches where that hole is on the set,” explains Goddard. “Because that’s where most of the light’s coming from. It was hitting a large amount of atmosphere, so we used a diffused version of that light, which contributed to a softer version of the key light. On a shot-to-shot basis, we would nudge that light around just to find the right visual aesthetic. In many of the shots where we’re looking straight down, the Dragonsnake would be very top-lit, but that’s not satisfying as an image, so we would nudge it over to introduce some shadowing.”
Boa Constructors
One of the many selling points of The Mandalorian and Grogu is the use of numerous visual effects techniques, from miniatures to CG, stop-motion to animatronics, puppetry to mask work. This blend of classic Star Wars skills makes for a visually engaging palette of effects. That eclectic approach has always been at the heart of ILM’s creative methodology, who used every tool at their disposal to bring the Dragonsnake and its lair to life.
“We used plates wherever we could,” says Madigan. “Sometimes plates had water motion filmed on set. If we could make that work with the FX team’s awesome effects and the surrounding shots, and hold onto some of the water for the Mando-based shots, which were almost completely plate water, then we would.” Retaining as much of the original on-set shoot was vital to grounding the scenes, but for a sequence like the Dragonsnake’s, it required some additional expertise from the Vancouver team. “The plate shots would be sandwiched around totally CG-created shots, so it was a case of figuring out where we could hold on to the work and effort they’d done on set.”
Richard agrees, adding, “The plates were beautifully shot, but one of the things that blew my mind – as simple as it sounds – were the shots where Mando and the Amani jump out of the water and you get this big spray splash event. We then extended the top of the frame, and the FX team created simulations of these splash events to marry into the on-set plate splashes. We had beautiful lighting from Michael’s team, and every time we gave Jason and our compositing team a challenging recipe, he came up with something really stunning.”
Teamwork is the key ingredient for success, as Michael Dharney explains. “Working intimately with all the other departments was crucial to the Dragonsnake sequences. There was a lot of cross-departmental pre-planning and bespoke problem-solving for each shot, with plenty of back-and-forth to get things just right. The added element of plate-based shots when Mando faces Dragonsnake added a whole other level of complexity. We actually had to redesign several shots in animation to get all these elements to work together, but thankfully, we had a lot of very clever folks piecing this together, and despite our Dragonsnake interacting with plate-based elements, the environment, the water, and other creatures, the crew really succeeded in delivering an incredibly convincing marriage of all these elements.”
Technology is ever-evolving in the world of Industrial Light & Magic, but something that hasn’t changed in half a century is looking at challenges from a different perspective. With the lighting team taking on rendering water rather than the effects crew, Goddard and his team were able to focus on the water’s look and movement. “We leaned on some of the tech that ILM has developed for water lately and adopted some of that to make it work for us,” notes Goddard. “ILM’s London studio has led the charge on that, most notably in Jurassic World: Rebirth [2025]. We decided early on that the close interaction of the characters and the water would be best rendered together, because then you get true refractions and reflections. This way we get volumetrics that distinguish and contaminate light values, and things like that look really pretty.”
In the spirit of another ILM classic, The Abyss (1989), “The surface of the water essentially became a character,” as Goddard adds. “We would light it the way we would a character, and it would respond. Sometimes we’d add in these creative decisions to beautify the water, maybe a bit more backlight to make it bloom a bit here and there.”
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