Following last week’s weekly First 4 Figures Q&A with CEO Alex Davis and Lieutenant Tsoek “Chockles” Cheung, F4F launched their final statue pre-order for the first half of 2018: the Crystal Dragon Dragon from the “Spyro the Dragon” video game. It’s polygonal shape has made it instantly one of the most unique statues the company has ever done, but the price has also been controversial among collectors. What factors contributed to the difficult development and production process of this piece? Let’s explore the the F4F Making of Crystal Dragon Documentary video and find out…

[The best way to experience these First4Figures Making of Documentaries is always, always to watch them in full yourself. In fact, I’m pasting the actual video above so that you can just hit the button and watch it right here! But if you don’t have an hour-plus to watch the video and still want all the juiciest bits from the documentary…? I’ve got you covered! Read on…]

The Basics:

• F4F has been working on this project for just under a year
• Debuted actual sculpt of this in October at NYCC
• Started the development of this statue around the time when Spyro was launched in July 2017

Ashley Laing: “Did you ever this that this would be the next statue in the Spyro the Dragon line?” (from 1:53 into the video)

• Crystal Dragon was chosen via community feedback in the First 4 Figures Official Collectors Club Facebook group. Alex was really quite surprised that this was such a requested piece by the fans!

Deniz Kip “What input from OCC members was put into creating this statue as it is now? And was this statue even on your radar?” (from 2:37 into the video)

• Alex really wanted to answer these first two questions close together, as they cover a lot of similar points.
• Originally, Alex had no idea that the Crystal Dragon would be the second piece in the Spyro line or that First 4 Figures would even be making a Crystal Dragon statue at all.
• But the F4F OCC is really great at giving their opinions on what they’d like to see next, and when polled on what Spyro character they most wanted (besides Spyro himself), the members of the Facebook Group voted for the Crystal Dragon over every other supporting character from the video game!
• F4F always tries its best to listen to what the fans want, and this Crystal Dragon is what the polling said that fans wanted most. Crystal Dragon wasn’t on F4F’s radar until the fans told them it should be on their radar.
• There was initial concern that fans would only want Spyro himself, but the polling data indicated that collectors would want other characters such as Crystal Dragons and not just Spyro.
• Input from the community was crucial to the selection of this statue to be made at all: it was 100% because of the input from the fans.

Brendan Rastello “How did you decide on the final size?” (from 6:00  into the video)

• First4Figures knew that they would really have to deal with the scale of this piece, because the actual size of Spyro vs. the Crystal Dragons in the game is a huge difference. It wasn’t going to be practical to keep this piece to scale. While the Crystal Dragon would still be bigger than Spyro, it couldn’t be to-scale as it was in the game or else it would be cost-prohibitive and no one would actually be able to collect it.
• Statues are getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and a lot of people are starting to run out of space. F4F wanted to keep this statue to a manageable size, and the F4F OCC had a lot of influence on the actual size that the Crystal Dragon statue would ultimately end up being.
• Alex thinks that F4F made the right choice for the Crystal Dragon for size, price and presence.

Brenton Friedli: “How many different green colors did you go through trying to get the right look?” (from 8:33 into the video)

• The answer is “a lot”.
• People may have the perception that this is an “easy piece” and not a “not easy piece”. There was no concern about the pose for this statue–F4F knew all they had to do was take the actual pose from the game and recreate it. In that respect, it was super-easy–but even though First4Figures knew what they had to go for early on, each plane had to be considered carefully. F4F was working off of really low-resolution pixelated in-game graphics.
• How the feet stand, the way the tail connects, etc. all had to be considered
• Really wanted to give this statue the complete polygonal feel rather than cheating and “rounding” the statue; needed to maintain a “cut crystal” origami-esque style
• What was easy is that the statue is symmetrical on both sides (other than the tail, which curls around like it does in the game)
• This is a “simple” shape, but actually incredibly complicated to design; you have to look close to see all the paint hits on this piece and all the ups and downs in the sculpt
• You have to actually touch the shapes and the ins and outs of the statue to fully understand the depth of the sculpting work
• When First4Figures made the first prototype of Crystal Dragon, it was all one color green and it looked rubbish. So they tried adding some shading… and it still looked really rubbish.
• Alex shows us some onscreen overlays of how the Crystal Dragon statue looked in all one color: not very good.
• When F4F conceptualized this, they thought this project was going to be very easy to make with a very simple paint scheme, but it didn’t actually work out that way: Alex can’t even tell us how many paint hits this statue has. This piece has an incredibly difficult paint job.
• It’s not just the different shades of green–it’s the placement of the shades of green. If you look at the wing itself, the “bone” and “webbing” area aren’t just one green–there’s subtle lines and highlights on them. As it gets closer to the edge of the bone, it gets darker and darker and there’s even a black wash.
• The black wash is actually spray-painted on, which required the areas around the black wash to be masked (covered) so that the original light green color would be maintained. This technique of subtle shades of darkness over the original light green via masking is used all over this statue.
• It’s actually harder to use this painting technique than the “normal” technique used on a statue like Spyro. While Spyro may look more complex at a glance, you have more of a tolerance for misalignments with a statue like Spyro. If you deviate from the clean lines on the Crystal Dragon, it’s incredibly apparent–there’s a far lesser tolerance.
• Using different colors on different planes gives the effect of shadows being cast on areas of the statue.
• Once First 4 Figures knew what this effect was going to be like, they knew that certain areas were going to have to have certain types of green on them. The difference between having a multitude of greens on this statue and having it be all-green is the difference between night and day.
• When Chocks first touched this statue, he was really surprised by how it feels–like real stone. It has a rough texture like concrete that feels quite different from the statues he’s used to touching and feeling.  This is a statue that feels good as well as looking good.
• Having the horns in a different color separates them from the rest of the design and means that there have to be perfect lines between the gold and the green so that the paints don’t get onto the wrong areas
• One of the difficulties in this piece itself is that when it comes time for production, there will need to be magnets or themself like that to maintain the wings sitting perfectly in position
• Resin quite easily warps and deforms, so F4F is having to use a PU material that’s actually better for a statue like this. The problem with PU is that the molds can’t be reused many times. Typically you can get 50-75 uses for the mold when slight differences and variations are acceptable, but on the Crystal Dragon this is not okay and each mold can only be used about 10 times. That means that the factory has to keep making molds from the original tooling master, which dramatically drives up the price of this piece.
• A lot of people incorrectly thing this is “super easy” to make because it’s polygonal, but the only “easy” aspect of this project was that First4Figures knew what this had to look like shape-wise from the beginning. Everything else has been a challenge.

On The Base:

• Actually forgot about the edging on the base the first time they did it, and had to go back and add it in order to be authentic to the game.
• Again–the base is not one color. There’s a beautiful dotted effect with whites going around the edges and the creases that are highlighted at each corner. The edges are darker–F4F had to highlight the planes in order to give the base the right shading effect.
• The base is taken directly from the game itself-. The base wouldn’t look right just being a grey or black base–it had to perfectly pair with the Crystal Dragon.
• The top surface part of the base was challenging to achieve from the resources available, but really looks accurate and fantastic now that it’s complete. Chocks had a lot of fun doing the research for this.

Devon Wennstrom “What do you think the Crystal Dragon’s best feature is?” (from 35:39 into the video)

• For Alex, it’s definitely the paintwork. F4F struggled so hard to get it right, but Alex is really happy with how it’s turned out.
• For Chocks, the stone-feeling texture is the highlight of the piece, even though that’s hard to capture on film.

Sarah Blakey “If you break it, does it unleash a dragon?” (from 36:39 into the video)

• Alex: “If you have to hit up CS and break it, we’ll find out.”
• “Handle with care!”

Measurements:

• Just about 5 330mL cans tall.
• 22″ Tall (56 cm)
• 17″ Wide (43cm)
• 22″ Deep (56 cm)
• The eight-sided base itself is around 17″ wide x 17″ deep x 2″ tall.
• Weight: 3.72 kg (Dragon) + 2 kg (Base) = 5.72 kg (Total)

Joshua Wareham: “How does this scale along side Spyro?” (from 41:33 into the video)

• The two statues look awesome next to each other, even though the Crystal Dragon is much smaller compared to Spyro than it is in the actual game.
• Crystal Dragon’s base is obviously much, much deeper and larger than Spyro’s base is.
• Spyro is much more elevated on his base than the Crystal Dragon is on his, but the Crystal Dragon is still much taller.

On The Exclusive Version:

• The Crystal Dragon Exclusive version looks the same at first glance, but actually has three differences from the regular version:
• 1) The Crystral Dragon EX has a button on the back of the base and an LED indicator because the top of the base lights up in both “always on” and “pulsing” modes. A removable, rechargeable battery is also included.
• 2) EX has Glow-in-the-Dark Paint that the regular version does not
• 3) EX Crystal Dragon includes a cute Mini Golden Dragon figure. This is because whenever you rescue a Crystal Dragon in the game, a golden indicator pops up that shows how many you’ve rescued in the video game so far. Wanted to include this as part of the exclusive as it coincides with the experience of playing the game. Haven’t 100% decided on what material this will be made of yet.
• Mini Golden Dragon measurements: 4″ tall (10 cm), 1.5″ wide (3 cm), 4″ deep (10 cm).
• Will also be offered as a combo pack of 2 Crystal Dragon Exclusives at a discount, as F4F figures some collectors would want multiple statues since there are many of these dragons in-game.

Abraham Sanchez: “What was the most challenging part for you guys?” (from 57:15  into the video)

• For Alex, it was definitely the paint scheme. It was incredibly challenging to go from a simple green to something worthy of this sculpt, franchise and F4F treatment.
• For Chocks, trying to replicate the polygonal look of this character from the Playstation game in 3-D was a difficult part of the project, as was coming up with cool extra features for the Exclusive version. This is a project that he’s been with First 4 Figures for the entire development of.
• The Crystal Dragon comes in seven separate pieces: the base, cheeks, tail, main body and wings. Pretty straight-forward assembly.

On Crystallized Crystal Dragon:

• The Crystallized Edition Crystal Dragon is molded in a semi-translucent color that you can’t completely see through, but can see the shadow from what’s behind it
• This version also comes with the exclusive base that lights up
• Tried to put LED lighting into the body of the dragon itself, but ultimately weren’t happy with not being able to get the lighting into the thinness of the wings and decided not to go that route
• Decided to just have the Crystallized Dragon be semi-translucent so that the light from the base could shine upwards into the statue
• Crystallized Edition also features Glow-in-the-Dark paint, but has a frosty looking feel to it because of the semi-translucent material used
• Has the same subtleties as the opaque versions, but with shading effects that are not as strong so that the frosty effect isn’t lost
• The frosted look gives a bit more of a “crystal” look to the statue
• Also comes with the Mini Golden Dragon figurine
• Chocks came up with the name “Crystallized Edition” himself–marketing genius!!
• Had to spend a lot of time with the paint shading and hiding the joint mechanisms inside of this version of the statue (since you can see inside of it)
• Combo version of the Crystallized Edition is also available at a reduced rate for a set of two

In addition, since this video documentary was created, First 4 Figures decided to add a mixed combo pack with one of each type of Crystal Dragon at a reduced price as well! Never forget that no one hears their fans’ voices more than F4F!

…And that’s a wrap! Learn anything interesting from this latest documentary, #F4Fans?