INSPIRED BY
A MASTER

'Dragon's' layout and visual effects artists found their thinking changed by working with Academy Award-winning DP Roger Deakins.

By Ellen Wolff

Roger Deakins, the Academy Award-winning DP who served as visual consultant on the Dragon trilogy, says that if a single word could sum up the photographic aesthetic of "The Hidden World," it would be 'restraint.'

"That's my mantra," Deakins says, "whether it's camerawork or lighting. Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should."

But such restraint sometimes leads to a rich, cinematic feel that evokes the best live-action cinematography, including Deakins' own work.

Take simple matters like depth of field. In animation, it's simple to put everything in a scene in focus and make it razor sharp, all the way to infinity. But Deakins says, "You don't have to shoot with a wide lens and have everything look pretty. Dean felt we could shoot with longer lenses and allow backgrounds to be out of focus."

Then there's the feeling that comes from the camera. In "The Hidden World," Vikings and dragons, once mortal enemies, are so allied that the Vikings have become dragon riders. DeBlois told his layout team (the department that creates the virtual camerawork) that he wanted every shot to seem as though there was an operator behind the camera, in his words, "to give the audience a very first-person visceral point of view, to make them feel like they were actually riding on the back of a dragon."

On "The Hidden World," Deakins teamed with head of layout Gil Zimmerman and VFX supervisor Dave Walvoord to plan how to place the virtual camera to show the lighting to best advantage, just as a DP would in live action.

Sometimes that light was inspired by Deakins' work. "Instead of us 'faking' the way Roger lights scenes," says Walvoord, "we could actually create soft lighting like he does." For example, many scenes were lit by firelight, or even candlelight, and characters would emerge dramatically out of darkness. "Our artists started thinking like cinematographers," Walvoord adds.

And that suited DeBlois perfectly. He welcomed the liberating possibilities that come with moving a camera through 3-D virtual space. "We realized that we had a certain subtlety with the camera that was not available to us in hand-drawn animation," DeBlois says.

Like Deakins, Zimmerman prefers camerawork that doesn't draw attention to itself. Zimmerman asserts, "I operate on the theory that if you overdo fancy camerawork, it undermines its power as a storytelling tool." He thinks that for every 'cool' shot, there should be 10 normal ones. "Then the 'gem' shot really stands out."

Zimmerman dislikes 'perfect' camera motion, so the fight scenes in "The Hidden World" have a hand-held feeling. He believes, "audiences are used to seeing camera operators 'catch up' with actors' movements, so we took every opportunity to add those human touches."

A POV ROOTED
IN NATURE

Production designer Pierre-Olivier Vincent tied the look of the dragons and their lair to the real world.

By Zoe Hewitt

Live-action production designers are responsible for creating sets and environments. On an animated feature, however, their duties extend to overseeing everything that shows up on screen, from the "locations" to the look of every character.

Production designer Pierre-Olivier Vincent — or simply "POV" as he known on the campus of DreamWorks, worked with writer-director Dean DeBlois for more than 12 years on the "How to Train Your Dragon" trilogy.

He knows the film's style down to his bones. But the ever-larger story of the final installment presented him some daunting challenges, including the newly introduced lair of the dragons, the Hidden World.

"We've been always treating the dragons like they were real creatures," says POV. "They don't have magical powers, for example. It's like if they were all real organic characters, so when they get to that world, we can push the envelope a little bit. We can do things that look like fantasy, but it's not a magic world."

That meant retaining some of the "real-world naturalism" he'd used in the previous films, and present this complex, fantastical realm in the same meticulous detail.

POV decided to base the heart of this world on geodes, "those rocks that look really rough on the outside, but then you crack them open and they're full of beautiful crystals," he explains. "They are real, we can see them, so we are not completely escaping some sort of reality."

The result certainly pleased DeBlois. "It has all been geometrically built, painstakingly surfaced and lit in such an incredible way," says the director, "that I think we could spend half of the movie down there and still feel like we hadn't seen everything."

Even aside from the home of the dragons, the film was a huge undertaking for the production designer.

Using natural renditions of real-world environments requires copious amounts of detail. In a forest, every trunk or branch must be designed — and the more
realistic the forest, the more such details are needed.

The film's forests, ships, villages and islands all required such attention, and DeBlois wanted them to look as realistic as possible.

"I think there is something tricky when you decide specifically in animation to go with something as close as possible to reality," POV muses, "because reality is a strange thing. Everybody has a clear understanding of it and therefore there are expectations.

"So sometimes we use tricks, sometimes we push a bit more color. Sometimes we have stronger shadows, something that you wouldn't necessarily see in reality, but it's also creating that kind of interesting graphic frame."

POV prefers to work with a half-dozen other artists at most. He started during pre-production and remained on the film until the final version was delivered.

"You start in the art department and then your hope is that from one department to the next it's going to get better and better," he says, "so everybody brought a little piece to that huge construction."

"You don't do it alone," he says. "You have fantastic people to support all this process, but at the end of the day, you're responsible for the look of the movie and delivering whatever is necessary for the movie to be done. So, that's why you're interacting with so many different departments, which is the reason why I love it so much."

FINDING BEAUTY
IN THE UNREAL

Visual effects tools built to mimic physics got a twist creating the stylized subterranean realm of dragons.

By Ellen Wolff

The Hidden World by the Numbers

• Lighting and Digimatte were in progress for 6 months
• Total data for the Caldera (Hidden World entrance) 68.5 terabytes
• 19.25 million core hours to render
• Over 3000 unique waterfalls in the Hidden World were created based on only 15 base simulations.
• The largest number of waterfalls in one shot: 639
• The Hidden World has 63.2 million mushrooms and 79.4 million pieces of coral
• The Mushroom Forest in the Hidden World is 3.1 miles long
• 22 giant rock spires were created for the Mushroom Forest, but they were repeated 6763 times
• The largest crowd shot has 42,000 Fireworm Dragons

Hordes of dragons breathe fire, soar through clouds and nosedive into crystalline waters, while humans fly astride them to conquer new, strange worlds.

Audiences came to expect those dazzling moments from the "How to Train Your Dragon" films, and the saga's finale, "The Hidden World," surpassed its predecessors. It provided incredible moments of such awe, thanks to a visual effects team whose work ranged from highlighting the tiny scales on a dragon's tail to intensifying the scale and color of massive infernos.

Visual effects supervisor Dave Walvoord defines his department's challenge succinctly: "The mission is to convince audiences that something that's not real is real."

That's an especially complex task for the creators of a computer-animated film which is meant to be neither cartoonish nor photo-real. Walvoord explains, "Our technology is basically designed to recreate the physical world. But that's not what we do in animation. We're making an animated version of live-action."

Head of effects Lawrence Lee, who's been Walvoord's DreamWorks collaborator for 16 years on both the "Dragon" and "Kung Fu Panda" franchises, says writer-director Dean DeBlois was interested in "world building."

"Dean's vision was that if there were dragons in the world, this was how it would feel. He wanted to build a world that was believable. But in an animated movie, what does that mean?" More realism means more detail, but the challenge wasn't simply to make it more realistic. "In live-action, fire just has to look like fire," says Lee. "In an animated film, sometimes a director will want 'happy' fire. We have to make elements that convey emotion."

Case in point: the fantastical circle of waterfalls that appear in the ocean, marking the entrance to the dragons' eponymous Hidden World. "We see water every day, so we had to show it in ways that were familiar to audiences," notes Lee. "But this was on such a big scale. We had to bend physics in this fantasy world."

The Light Fury presented a huge rendering challenge. Walvoord admits, "I underestimated how hard she was going to be!"

"The Light Fury has the ability to make herself disappear," adds Lee. "That was the closest we got to creating magical effects."

For Dragon's longtime VFX pros, departing "The Hidden World" was poignant.

DEFT CUTTING
CAN SUMMON TEARS

Editor John K. Carr helped shape 'Hidden World' from early story reels through the trilogy's finale.

By Zoe Hewitt

First cuts of any film can come in long. The first cut of "The Hidden World's" final battle, with aerial action and a fight on the ground happening simultaneously, presented editor John K. Carr with a puzzle.

The sequence was too long and had to be trimmed. Carr compensated by intercutting between land and air. "You're still getting these epic, dynamic shots and you can still see the action down below," says Carr. "There's a lot to look at." But unlike a live-action editor, Carr had to make his cuts before "shooting" started.

In animation, though, the editor initially cuts a crude version of the film using animated storyboards, temporary voices and sound effects. Then, when everyone is satisfied, scenes are launched into production.

Carr worked shoulder-to-shoulder with writer-director Dean DeBlois throughout the process. In "The Hidden World," Carr uses a technique DeBlois calls "scaffolding dialogue" — replacing dialogue with pantomimed action accompanied by sound and music. In other words, he shows, rather than tells. Says DeBlois, "It allows the score to really take over and help inform the audience as to what is going on within the characters' hearts."

Take the introduction of the Hidden World, where dragons dwell. "There's not a lot of dialogue, so that's fun," says Carr. "It's the time to get to actually explore longer shots and just enjoy the surroundings. It starts off sort of fluid and smooth and then when they're getting chased, there are quicker cuts."

The first "date" between Toothless and the Light Fury is a prime example of Carr's technique. The scene originally included Hiccup and Astrid providing commentary (Carr describes it as: "Oh, he's not doing that. Oh, he needs to do this.") But through "scaffolding," narration becomes superfluous.

"There are a couple of shots where Hiccup will slap his forehead and put his head down and shake it," says Carr, adding, "If we are able to successfully convey that relationship editorially, without dialogue, then that's a great compliment because that's what we set out to do."

Carr is most proud of the sequence in which Hiccup and Toothless say goodbye. "I love the pace of it. It's perfect for this big emotional scene about the impact Hiccup and Toothless have had on one another, how they've been such an important part of each other's lives and are now having to say goodbye," says Carr.