Cary Phillips walks through ILM's character pipeline for Dragonheart in new Befores & Afters podcast

Cary Phillips from Industrial Light & Magic just sat down with Befores & Afters to break down how ILM built characters for Dragonheart. You can listen to the full conversation here. If you work as a character artist or technical director in film or games, this is the kind of talk you need to hear. ILM's workflows become industry standards because they work at a scale where you have to balance speed with quality. What Phillips describes isn't theory. It's what actually happens when you've got deadlines and dozens of people depending on your systems. He walks through character development from modeling and rigging all the way through animation and rendering, and he talks about the real problems: how to avoid bottlenecks, how to keep iterations fast, what tools make it all possible. Character development is the unglamorous part that rarely shows up in credits, but it's where everything lives or dies. How you organize topology, UV layout, bone structure, blend shapes, all of that flows downstream. When the pipeline is solid, animators spend less time fighting with rigs, and that time goes into actual creative work. Phillips is talking about the stuff that usually stays locked inside studio walls. If you're freelance or working at a smaller studio, you probably don't have ILM's resources, but understanding why they build things the way they do lets you apply that thinking to what you actually have. Character development is about more than making something look good. It's about building systems that hold up when production hits you with everything it's got. A conversation like this is rare access to how that actually works.