Hello, everybody at home.
My name is Dean DeBlois,
and I am the writer, director and executive producer
of How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World.
And I am Brad Lewis.
I don't have as many titles as Dean does on the movie,
but I was the producer
on How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World.
Hi, I'm the guy with the weird accent.
That's Simon Otto, that's me.
And I was the head of animation on the film.
This was a painting that I was developing,
time-lapse over the course of the movie.
Your evening project.
So this opening sequence
was actually designed to do a couple of things.
We wanted to establish our heroes quickly for those who might have been
unfamiliar with the previous films or the TV series.
And we wanted to set up the stakes,
that there are still dragon hunters out there and dragons are still in danger.
We wanted to present our heroes in cool new outfits
that show how far they've come
and how similar they are to their own dragons.
These are made from shed dragon scales, which make them fireproof.
And we just wanted everyone to have a really cool introduction
that allows us to define them in a really quick way.
I was really happy to see that that image became one of the posters.
When Hiccup walks through the fire, that's really amazing.
Yeah, that's one of my favorites, as well.
One of the things, Dean, you always said is that, you know,
Hiccup was actually, sort of, becoming a dragon himself.
And I always thought that image of him walking through the fire was, sort of,
one of the iconic images for this scene.
Yeah. And then, of course, it all starts to fall apart,
so we wanted a moment of cool for Hiccup
to be reintroduced to the audience along with Toothless,
and then to have it just all start to go haywire
with the arrival of everyone else.
The idea was that we wanted to present this gang of dragon rescuers
that have all been trained under Valka
to do that, sort of, vigilante work of rescuing dragons.
But to also show that
they're far too reliant upon their own dragons for their success
and they haven't really come to rely upon one another yet.
It's a little bit of a journey they have
through the story of becoming a better team together
and not so dependent on their dragons in every situation.
And now, he's right where I wanted him.
Let's get to work.
The other tonal thing that
we really worked on the balance for, in this scene was
because it's a big action scene, but our gang, they're funny, right?
They're hapless, they don't always do everything perfectly.
And part of it is also reintroducing the audience, or a new audience,
into what the real tone and fun and interrelationships are.
And that these guys are... They can be a bumbling crew,
as well as even if they're doing something
that looks, kind of, derring-do.
Yeah.
We should talk about this shot real quick.
So, this shot was one of the most challenging shots in the movie for us
in animation because it essentially is, I think, a 1,000-frame shot with no cut.
And we figured out a way to do it by adding, like, seven animators.
And we grabbed them from other movies just to work on this shot.
It was such a little short film that they did all together,
handing off from one character to the other.
And it was incredible to see how the shot came together
in the fairly quick time for what the shot is.
This is the longest shot ever created by DreamWorks, correct?
I mean, it's definitely up there. If it's not the longest, it's...
It's definitely one of them.
Yeah, it was certainly...
It was ambitious on the part of Gil Zimmerman, our head of layout.
He was inspired by some of these shots of dense choreography
that we had seen in recent films and he wanted to create it in animation,
but he didn't quite realize what we were handing off to our animation team.
Eventually.
Move out! We've got 'em all.
I love the dense fog and the lights, and the way the light plays with it.
I think that was really exciting.
It was really nice to actually start the film
with what becomes a series of very strong color choices
in terms of the palette and time of day and atmosphere.
And I really love the bold choices they were making.
Now, here is the last purpose of this scene,
which is to introduce, in a very brief way, the Light Fury.
She was one of the dragons left behind in the cages.
But because of her camouflage, she ends up remaining there
'cause Toothless didn't quite make her out.
He senses that someone's there,
but doesn't quite figure it out until a little bit later in the story.
Now, of course, we wanted to have our iconic fly into the village
with the "This is Berk" speech
and really use this moment to establish how far gone they are
as a dragon-Viking utopia.
It's on the brink of collapse.
It's absolutely overpopulated,
and we wanted it to be fun and chaotic.
No one's really complaining about it, except for maybe Gobber,
but it should look unsustainable.
It should look like they can't handle these numbers,
and they're gonna have to make a change in some way.
So part of Hiccup's problem in the story is that he's in denial about it.
He's achieved his dream.
Here it is, dragons and Vikings living together.
The largest commune on the planet.
And at the same time, it's gonna fall apart very soon.
Gang, meet our latest Berkians.
It was really challenging for our crowds department on this movie
to populate these scenes with so many dragons and so many Vikings
and still not distract the eye
so you're able to follow the important action.
Hats off to the whole department.
They managed crazy numbers.
I think they've done the most complex shots by far
in DreamWorks history within this movie.
Yeah, it was really challenging to give them all a purpose
and then feel like they belong in the environment
and they're doing something specific.
And I think we succeeded.
We were trying to establish some relationships here
that we wanted to track through the story.
This one is Snotlout wanting to be the prize student,
and he's doing everything he can to suck up to Valka
and then gloat to the others about his status.
Fishmeat.
This is also our chance to introduce a couple of our new dragons.
Goregutter, which is based on the ancient elk.
Yes.
And also the Hobgobblers, as well as Fishmeat.
Right, Fishmeat is a baby Gronckle,
so Fishlegs rides a Gronckle named Meatlug, and this is one of her babies
and he acts as the surrogate father, carrying it around in a little Baby Björn.
...is having the king of dragons around if he can't keep the order?
Hey, bud, do you wanna do something here?
And where do you suppose we put these ones?
Ah, we'll make room.
Another silly little through-line.
We designed this dragon partly inspired by a tree frog meets a French bulldog.
And he's, in part, voiced by my now sadly deceased
little French bulldog named Gordy.
But he's an alarming sight for Gobber, and we don't quite know why.
But as we track through the story,
we start to see the Hobgobblers multiplying at an alarming rate
and finally we'll pay that off in the end.
You know, this opening shot coming into this sequence,
in addition to the opening shot of seeing how overcrowded Berk was,
that fly-in shot and the shot we talked about on the ship,
three of the most complex shots in DreamWorks history,
all with entirely different lighting setups and amount of detail
really stretching the new renderer.
And our lighting team and effects team
just knocked these out of the park.
And I think that the thing to say there is
usually an animator takes on a shot and does all the characters in the shot.
For example, this shot was animated by Sean Sexton,
who just animated all these characters,
and then there's crowd characters that are done by the crowds department.
But some of these special shots that you're mentioning, Brad,
are shots that were animated by five to eight animators at the same time
and to coordinate how the characters interact with each other
is incredibly challenging in CG animation.
Okay, okay. I'll think about it.
Hang up those saddles and get married.
I think POV and Dave had their hands filled
with lots of high, aspirational ideas in this movie
that Roger Deakins helped them execute.
With you wearing the pants, there's still hope.
- Wow! - Gobber...
Not awkward at all.
Astrid, don't be like that.
That is a definitive no.
Look, if you need a beard to cry on,
just lean on my shoulder and you can cry into my...
How many beard jokes did we have
in the original version of this, in storyboard?
I think we had, like, six beard jokes.
And, Dean, I think we fell in love with them,
but I think we got some early feedback we needed to pull a couple back.
Some late feedback, as well.
We ended up cutting a couple of shots that were done and lit
that had Tuffnut cracking beard jokes.
It just turned out to be a bit too many.
Now here, again, is a completely different look.
This whole location was actually designed to represent the oppression
of the negative effect of the warring humans
and how they, kind of, desecrate this sacred site
and turn it into a war camp.
And here we see dragons are being caged and tortured
and being weaponized.
And this whole idea was to show what awaits the dragons
should Hiccup and his people fail to protect them.
This is where that cargo of dragons was headed to.
And another species of dragon that we hadn't shown before,
these Deathgrippers are, sort of, a mixture of scorpion
and strange insect-like beasts.
That was really something we had to develop and invent,
and the way these guys move.
My dear warlords.
Now, normally we figure out the casting for a character
before we get very far into animating that character.
In this case, it was kind of special and different.
We had finally settled upon a design that we really liked for Grimmel,
and that was provided to us by Carter Goodrich.
And as that character was turned into a model,
articulated and ready for animation,
the supervising animator of this character, whose name is Rani Naamani,
was just looking through the Internet
and considering different possibilities of who the actor might be
that would play the character,
and he was providing a few suggestions.
And in the case of F. Murray Abraham,
he found a clip that he really liked, and he animated a test
using the animation rig that was ready for this character.
And it was so appealing and surprising and charming
that it won everybody over.
And Murray wasn't immediately on our minds for a candidate to play the character,
but this completely sold us.
And so we sent that test
and a description of the character to Murray,
and he responded right away, saying that he'd love to be a part of it.
And it was the best choice we could've made.
He's just such a fantastic character.
And as an enthusiastic actor,
every session, Murray's just infectious enthusiasm
and always wanting to get it right and working hard
to make sure that he loved it, Dean loved it,
and that we got the story point right.
It was really a highlight for the animators
when Murray came to our dailies session, and he sat in and sort of...
Sat with us as we were reviewing some animation
and all the animators were sitting in the room.
It was really a highlight for everybody.
They don't have a leader, just a boy.
Hiccup.
Originally, this flashback was meant to be one of,
I think, six different flashbacks we had in the movie,
that would show Hiccup at a young age, interacting with his father,
memories that had an impact on his present day
and the decisions that he had to make.
And they were really sweet.
We've included some as deleted scenes
in the home video version of this.
But when you're making an animated movie, you are limited by time.
The budget dictates how long the movie can be
'cause it's so expensive to make these films.
And so ultimately we had to choose
the most important flashbacks to use in the movie,
and the ones that had the greatest relevance in the narrative,
and so, yeah, we had to cherry-pick.
This is one of two flashbacks that we have in the film with Stoick,
and I think it lends a really warm presence
to see this character back on screen.
And also, it's just very sweet to see Hiccup at an even younger age.
It gives us a glimpse into those moments that made Hiccup the character he is.
You know, for me, this moment when he admits
that he had a plan for peace
coexisting with the dragons,
to me, is a huge reveal in this flashback that really buys its way into the movie.
You know, that flashbacks should be there, not just to reminisce,
but to be there for a good, strong story purpose.
And the idea that maybe Hiccup and his dad
do share some similarity of heart and soul
by knowing that Stoick wanted to have the dragons put away from the humans
so they wouldn't be warring forever,
I thought was a really great early reveal, emotional reveal.
It gives you a greater understanding of the character, right, of Stoick.
So, in this scene, we have fun with the prosthetic, right?
Where they're playing catch with the prosthetic.
And I think, early on, we thought the idea in story was entertaining,
but we wanted to make sure we were being respectful about it.
We had the opportunity to show the movie to the Amputee Coalition,
and they laughed heartily at this scene,
and they said they really enjoyed this
and other ideas and fun that we had with the prosthetic and sort of interactions.
Yep. And the more dragons we bring back here,
the bigger of a target we become.
I just wish there was some way to make them leave us alone.
A lot of these scenes between Hiccup and Astrid
through all three movies
were animated by the two supervising animators
of these two characters.
Jakob Jensen for Hiccup and Shaggy Hornby for Astrid.
And they have, kind of, reached
a level of understanding of these characters,
and how these characters move that
in the launches that you, Dean, gave these animators,
you just gave them the box of what the purpose of the story is
and how the scene should function, and you kind of let them explore it.
And it's really great to watch them come back
with not just one scene, but usually a string of scenes.
Ten, 12 scenes strung together,
you could really watch the moment unfold.
And of course, there's other animators that supported the sequence as well,
but it's very interesting to see them work together on the scenes.
Yeah. And on Hiccup in this movie, in particular, Fabio Lignini
had taken the lead on a lot of these important performance shots with Hiccup,
- including this right here. - Yeah, these are amazing.
Such a playful, beautiful interaction between the two of them.
And it feels so natural. I mean, that was our goal.
We wanted to make sure that Hiccup and Astrid
feel like an established couple.
They don't have to be giddy around one another,
and nervous and full of butterflies.
I think they've been together long enough that they know how to rib each other
and just be comfortable in one another's presence.
You wanna get the sense that Hiccup is unaware
that Astrid is his true support.
And his future.
'Cause everything that Hiccup has achieved so far
is largely credited to his bond with Toothless.
Before that, Hiccup was kind of in the way all the time.
He couldn't do anything right.
And his relationship with Toothless is what changed everything for him.
Now, he's respected, he's powerful, he's a leader.
And I think Hiccup's deepest insecurity is that,
should Toothless ever go away,
that he would be reduced to that unworthy character
he saw himself as in the first film of the trilogy.
And this is really where we introduce that problem, that challenge for Hiccup.
So, Toothless comes upon this rare and elusive variation of his species
rather innocently in the woods.
He doesn't quite realize at the moment that this is part of a trap,
and she does try to warn him right away.
But the idea is that she's the engine of change.
She's brought into the story,
in a nefarious way through Grimmel,
but her interaction with Toothless is pure.
And his fascination with her is met with her curiosity about him.
So going forward, they're drawn together.
And we soon learn through Grimmel that Furies mate for life.
So it's a bond that neither one of them can really fight.
And Hiccup, who is at first very enthusiastic
about Toothless finding a mate,
is going to have to come to realize that Toothless having a mate means
Toothless will be drawn back into the wild, eventually.
You can see here some of the great fun
and challenge of working on
the How to Train Your Dragon movies for the animators, was that
you're communicating fairly complex story moments
through pantomime with animal behavior.
And the supervising animators on these two characters,
Dane Stogner for Toothless and Thomas Grummt for the Light Fury,
had the real important moment here to just understand that
she tells him, "Don't come here. Something really dangerous is here."
And then his just immediate crush
that he experiences on her and then her disappearing...
And that disappearance was something that we came up with
for the Light Fury in order to make her have a unique ability,
one that she later teaches Toothless.
So the idea was that she would blast a fireball ahead of herself,
fly through it, and the heat from the fire
would turn her skin and her scales mirror-like,
so that she would reflect her environment.
Whether it's in the sky or in the forest,
she would seem to disappear until she cooled off,
and then she would reappear seemingly out of nowhere.
Okay. Got it.
What a night.
Bud, what's gotten into you?
What is all this slobbering and panting?
Isn't it obvious?
He's in love.
Trust me, relationships are nothing but pain and misery.
I always love watching Fishmeat in Fishleg's backpack or wherever he is.
He seems to be perpetually entertained.
A very happy little dragon.
So we did a lot of hunting for animal behavior in this movie,
in story and in animation.
It's like, "What are all the interesting things
"that different kinds of animals do to..."
You know, mating dances and courtship behavior.
And then also, just like everyday things that animals do,
and we really tried to find
the behaviors that fit these dragons the best,
that help us also define and differentiate each dragon.
We wanted them to feel grounded in reality and feel familiar.
Good idea. A little privacy.
It's boy talk.
- What? - Come on, let's go work this out.
Again, I just love the contrast
that our production designer, Pierre-Olivier Vincent,
and our visual effects supervisor, Dave Walvoord,
came up with in working with Roger Deakins for each of these sequences.
They feel complementary and yet very different.
Going into the forest from that stable,
the palette changes completely,
and we really kind of commit to the idea of the environment
and how that bounced light affects the color of their skin,
and the environment is just alive with insects
and all of the ferns are moving around.
This is something that we were not really able to do in the past,
or if we attempted it, it was at just great anguish and expense.
But the great gain of this movie is that we have something called MoonRay now,
and it's a back-end renderer
which allows us to put so much detail on screen
that was just not possible before because it's very fast.
And the method of tracking the light from these sources
is much more sophisticated.
It actually tracks the light rays from whatever light you decide
is the dominant light of your scene.
And then, so as the light falls upon their faces
or their hair, that's all calculated in rays.
And as the light bounces off of,
say, the green ferns and gives them a green under light,
that's also all calculated.
Millions of light rays
calculated mathematically at lightning fast speed,
and it just gives it such a sophisticated look.
Technology is really kind of...
They're the unsung heroes of our movies, right?
In a way, like, pushing it forward at each...
With each movie, some new things become available
that allow us to do certain things visually that we weren't before.
This movie is a tour de force for that kind of thing.
In addition to what Dean was talking about, the renderer,
we have all the ferns moving,
we've got the hair on top of the cliff blowing.
We've got character effects and effects development
that we're debuting on this movie
that allows us to handle
hundreds and thousands of effects on things in the scene
that really sets you, atmospherically, in that place.
You really get a feel for that scene because of all these things
that are naturally happening that might not draw your eye,
but it really brings you to a sense of place.
It's tangible and it feels real.
It's designed and stylized, but it feels real.
That's always something we talked about.
In terms of look and design,
we wanted a world that felt caricatured and pushed to a certain degree,
and the shapes were exaggerated,
and it was, sort of, a whimsical version of reality,
but we always wanted the textures to feel real
and the world to be believable
so that we could believe in the dragons and the human characters,
and their emotions and the story in itself.
Yeah, the look is very much tied to the story conceit of
making it appear as though dragons once roamed this world, our world.
And this is the story of when they existed and, ultimately, when they went away.
And part of that is we wanted people to believe in the peril,
you know, not only are these dragons influenced by very specific animals
that the animators referenced, but they also are...
Very importantly, the physics feel real.
You know, if you got in the way of dragon fire, it would burn you.
If you fell from a great height,
you wouldn't make it, you would die.
This is a world where cartoon physics are not the dominant mentality.
And so, part of that was rendering it with a certain amount of believability
with credibility in the textures.
When you see the fur, the scales, the hair, the skin,
it's designed to look tangible and credible,
as opposed to leaning on cartoony conventions too heavily.
Well, your father knew of me.
Now, there was a chief.
One of the greatest dragon hunters to have ever lived.
What would he think of you?
We talk about little bits of improv in different sessions.
I love that take of Murray's when he does, "Should I call you Hiccup or..."
That was just so funny,
him playing around with different deliveries
for the idea for that line, when he came up with that.
Hilarious.
The sting in the line when he says, "What would he think of you?"
I just love it and it really comes through that
he's mocking him.
You are going to give me that dragon, or I will...
This movie allowed us some opportunities to really explore a villain
that had charm and a point of view
and just some onscreen entertainment.
He's not just a brute.
He represents intolerance. He's cunning and calculating.
He's an accomplished hunter who's established a reputation for himself
by being so effective.
And so, we wanted to create a nemesis that was going to be fitting for Hiccup,
and somebody whose core philosophy
was absolutely opposed to what Hiccup stands for.
This idea of integration, of coexistence, is appalling to Grimmel.
And so, not only has he come here to find Toothless, to trap him
and, ultimately, kill him,
he's come here to teach this kid a lesson
about his forward thinking and what it would do to his world.
He's a very different kind of a hunter. He's not just a might hunter.
The way he's eliminated Night Furies is by psychologically outthinking them.
Right? It's a predator that outthinks his prey.
And basically, now we're introducing the idea of,
it's exactly what he's gonna do with Hiccup, his new prey.
He's gonna psychologically out think him.
He's psychotic.
These Deathgrippers were a lot of fun to design as well,
but we recognized that we needed to establish a method
by which Grimmel could control them.
'Cause within our world, that's important.
We know that Hiccup has taught people how to befriend dragons.
Drago was all about brute force and intimidation,
but Grimmel's a little smarter than that.
And so, he's actually used this specific species which has a stinger,
not unlike a scorpion, and he extracts the venom.
And with small doses, by reinjecting that venom,
he can subdue dragons and kind of lean on their will a little heavier.
All right. All right, everybody. Settle down, please.
Fishlegs,
have you ever seen that species of dragon before?
Let me at him!
I'll give him a piece of my mind!
And by mind, I mean fists!
Did you miss the part where we almost died?
Have you seen my house?
This is a new kind of enemy.
We did so many versions of this scene.
Some of them were just with Hiccup and Astrid and Valka.
Simon boarded at least three of them.
Ultimately, it ended up being this town hall with everybody.
And it's an important scene because
it has to be credible that Hiccup
would consider leaving their home of seven generations
to embark on this wild-goose chase of a quest.
We had to make sure that the stakes were high enough,
that he didn't seem overreactive, nor did he seem cowardly.
He needs to be thinking about the future.
And even though it's controversial among his people,
his point needs to be strong.
And so we thought having everybody gathered together
in the wake of Grimmel's attack was the right moment
to float this wild idea,
this very Hiccup-y idea of finding the Hidden World.
The other thing that we talked about is
there's a demarcation point here.
This is as confident as we have seen Hiccup to this point in time as a leader,
and he's got Toothless by his side.
Little do we know that, after this scene,
he loses Toothless, and then he also loses his confidence.
That's, sort of, visually, symbolically important as well to the story,
that Toothless is at his side.
Right. And what's also important is that Astrid,
even though she doesn't believe in this idea,
that she thinks it's kind of crazy,
she already said so on the top of the cliff.
She does silence everybody and support him publicly.
And that's something that is powerful in their relationship,
and I think it speaks to how necessary they are to one another.
We are Berk. The people, the dragons.
I say Berk is wherever we go.
I'm with him! Who else?
So, Simon, you should talk about
the challenges of having this many dragons and people
and sheep in disguise, all up in the air.
- It's gotta be pretty complicated. - Yeah, yeah.
And again, it's similar to earlier,
there's so many layers of different people doing different things.
Obviously, there's the hero animation in the foreground,
character animation and then different levels of crowds in the back.
In certain cases, for example, Gothi with her seven Terrible Terrors back there,
that was animated by an animator
who was just working on that particular thing
and then we copied that animation into multiple shots.
So, we found so many different ways of making it
because even, like, you couldn't open a shot
inside a software and see it all in its finished state.
So, you had to find some workarounds
to get it all in there and make it entertaining and believable.
It just keeps going.
That's 'cause the world is actually round.
The sun's round. The moon's round.
Stars are round.
Even though they're small and stupid.
Right? Stars.
Now, these intercut scenes used to be entire scenes onto themselves,
and it was thanks to our editors,
a very clever idea of turning it into more of a montage
by just keeping the best bits of both scenes and intercutting them.
The Light Fury!
She's following us!
That's such a tough effect to pull off, period.
But to pull that disappearing effect off
in the middle of the bright sky, it's just a...
The effects team did a phenomenal job on that.
Yeah.
This is just one of my favorite moments in the movie.
- Just tosses... - "Hey, it's nice to meet you!"
That always got a laugh from the early boards,
the different versions we had of it,
it just always worked.
She would just toss him.
And also in a comedic way, goes to express the dilemma here.
Hiccup is learning very quickly that he's not part of this equation,
and if Toothless is to establish a relationship with the Light Fury
and have her join their flock,
then he's going to have to do it on his own.
Because Hiccup is unwelcome in the Light Fury's world.
She's quick to get rid of him.
Which is kind of embarrassing and humbling for him,
the Viking who's taught everyone how to interact with dragons
and who seemingly can tame even the most wild and aggressive of dragons.
So, if POV, Pierre-Olivier Vincent, our production designer were here,
he would talk about this island,
which we come to know as New Berk,
as being kind of a bold statement.
It was meant to be an island that looms out of the clouds
with sheer cliffs hundreds of feet high,
and above it, through these rocky battlements,
you would discover a valley, a pristine valley with a lake,
trees and pastures and just this ideal spot
for the dragons and the humans,
which is accessed only by those with wings.
It's both safe and kind of a paradise.
We figured if they were going to leave Berk,
then they would have to find a place that was not just equal,
but would surpass it in its beauty.
And ultimately, though it makes its way into the story as kind of a pit stop,
it becomes, in the end, the place where the Vikings settle.
Get outta my house!
Hey! Is there a problem here?
Yeah, there's a problem.
Ever since you showed up, you've been trying to upstage me.
You're just so jealous. It's delusional.
Yeah, delusion's a good word for it.
Listen, son of Eret.
Beautiful shot by Sean Sexton.
He's got a real knack for these comedic shots.
He was supervising those, I think, the kids' characters
like Snotlout, Fishlegs, Ruff and Tuff.
And then Fabio Lignini supervised not only parts of Hiccup,
but also Gobber, throughout all the three movies.
- This one's mine! - This one's mine!
Here we have the multiplied beach balls. He always called them beach balls.
Okay.
Hold on, gang. I said make camp.
From the moment I wrote that joke, I figured it would get cut out.
Strangely, it's always gotten a good laugh, so it remained,
but it was a groaner from the beginning.
And we just figured out now,
nobody wants to be reminded of Stoick's death in such a callous way.
But it sums up Snotlout in it so clearly.
He's the only idiot that would say something like that.
Well, I guess this can work as a base in the meantime.
It's defensible. Hidden.
I love the idea that they immediately want to build an entire village.
Right. That's what they do.
It's not just...
They're so used to rebuilding their own village.
I love how they shave their armpits.
Who knew?
It was really important back in the day.
If you're going to continue west,
I should head back to make sure we weren't followed.
Great idea. I'll go with you for protection.
We had to make little adjustments to the Snotlout-Valka dynamic
because upon our first test screening, people thought that
there was a little romance developing between them,
and that was never the intention.
We just wanted to indicate that he was, sort of,
desperate for her attention.
He wanted to be the teacher's pet.
He just wants validation.
He just wants to be number one at something, anything.
Slowly adjusting his expectations.
Do you still think I'm crazy or...
And again, this was a difficult relationship to get right.
We'd adjusted this several times, the Astrid-Hiccup dynamic,
so that she was just supportive enough without being too sycophantic, I guess.
And at the same time,
supportive where she could have been judgmental.
And just finding that right balance
so that she's going along with it, but she's letting him know
that she doesn't entirely believe in it.
And it's just a way of keeping that relationship strong
with strong points of view.
They respect one another to give each other the space to think.
And at the same time, she'll call him out
if she thinks that he's leading them astray.
This is one of those sequences
where we do our best to just get rid of dialogue
and let the pantomime and John Powell's beautiful music
weave a spell.
And we've come to realize since the first film
with Forbidden Friendship and Romantic Flight,
that those sequences become the standout moments in the movie.
We knew that we wanted to have
this, kind of, bumbling courtship, first-date sequence
with a magical connection in the beginning as she lures him out of the camp.
That's actually the first scene we animated, the first scene in production.
Yeah. Yeah, you are right, the very first scene.
So it gave us some time to really get up to speed with
not only the Light Fury,
but in getting reacquainted with Toothless.
And it was like we were...
I think, at every department, we were still pretty small,
so we could be just a few people really focusing
and getting the heartbeat of the movie in there already.
And I think, subsequently, it really helped
every screening moving forward, that we had
this centerpiece there already.
And also just learning the animation language of the Light Fury.
I mean, there's a lot of conversations about how she might move,
and how elegant, how feral, how strong she is.
But it was in this scene, in these two scenes,
that we really defined who she is
for us as a small team in getting started,
but then also for the balance of the movie.
It was a real centering time for us.
Actually, the first shot, I think, is this one right here.
This was the first one to be animated?
At least the first one we started with, that Laurent Caneiro did.
This is a familiar, almost clichéd situation
going all the way back to Cyrano de Bergerac,
the idea that a bumbling amateur might be looking to someone else
hiding in the bushes for advice.
But, yeah, this was our take on it.
We thought it would be so fun
to have Light Fury, who is of the dragon world.
She's actually of the Hidden World.
She knows the dragon ways and she's very distrusting of humans,
so she hasn't been corrupted at all.
Having to interact with Toothless, who is the last of his kind,
and who has, over these couple of years, become domesticated.
So that interaction was going to be fun regardless,
because he clearly likes her, but he has no idea what to do.
To make it worse, he is now looking to his human companion for advice.
Which is a terrible idea.
So, combined with what he's observed in the stables and with other dragons,
and Hiccup giving him cues,
he's just making a complete disaster of this.
And the idea was to have this sequence be a companion piece
to Forbidden Friendship in the first movie.
So that when he starts drawing in the sand,
you think you know what's going to happen, and in fact,
he actually produces something that, the first time, looks like a real drawing.
Well, we talked about how aspirational the movie is,
both in our lighting and effects appetite. This scene,
for Lawrence Lee and the effects team,
between the water, the sand and everything,
there's so much in it.
The lighting conceit of having to go from predawn
to the sun coming up by the end of the scene.
I mean, it's a time-of-day change within the scene...
All incredibly challenging,
and it also sets a really high bar for the movie relatively early on.
We've already seen a couple effects-heavy scenes,
but what an accomplishment.
You can go scene by scene and really see the imprint of so much great teamwork
and such aspirational ideas for every one of these sequences.
A lot of the core ideas in the sequence actually came out of the storyboards.
Right. Yeah.
Like the boards...
I mean, obviously, it was recut and restaged
and many new ideas came to it, but...
Yeah, some terrific ideas from Bolhem Bouchiba,
who had storyboarded a lot of the interaction between the dragons.
And then Tron Mai, who had done
some of the early concept work on this sequence, too.
Tron was the head of story on the movie.
The first time I saw the lighting renders come through, and a shot like this,
where you can almost see every grain of sand,
I thought, "Wow, we have grown up. This is amazing."
It used to be that we would have to avoid things
that would displace under the feet of our characters, you know.
Couldn't have them walking through grass or loose dirt without it being painful.
I'd always say, "Stage it on rock."
But this is just so impressive, so believable.
And as it always goes with first sequences,
you second guess yourself more than you should.
Remember how we were talking about,
"Should these scenes be in? Should these scenes be out?"
And we trimmed down shorter versions and then extended it again.
And in the end, I think, with a little bit of distance,
we felt pretty confident that it was actually there.
You know, it's such a significant thing to talk about.
We weren't talking about limitations of artistry or technology or appetite.
We were talking about what was right for the story.
And that's such an immense freedom,
to just think about what is right for this shot, for the story, for the sequence,
not, "We better put that on a tile surface
"because we can't do something that's organic."
It's been phenomenal in that way, this movie very, sort of, freeing artistically.
It's the kind of sequence where the story points come through the script
and it's clear what the scene has to be about.
But it can be executed in so many different ways,
that when it's just pantomime and there's no dialogue in it,
it can be interpreted so many different ways,
and to find that is the pleasure and the pain of making animated movies.
Someone hasn't slept.
Yeah. Well, that Light Fury won't let me within a mile of her.
This is another thing, if you're paying attention as a viewer,
you'll notice that Astrid is collecting scales
that Toothless is scratching off of himself.
And they dump them into this little mortar and pestle
and mash them up with some Toothless saliva,
creating a paint.
And that paint, because it's made of dragon scales, is fireproof.
So that's the way in which Toothless' new tail can be permanent,
can be a tail that will stay together even in dragon fire.
And I thought that was a really clever solution that Kevin Ochs came up with.
Kevin Ochs is our head of rigging.
And he's quite a scientifically-minded guy.
But if we couldn't put actual scales on the tail,
he said, "Well, why don't you grind them up?
"Then you could have a paint."
- Which made a lot of sense. - It did.
Fire when ready.
This was one of the early sequences, as well.
- Yeah. - Maybe the second one
that we put in production.
I was just gonna say that one shot where Astrid is holding the tail,
and Hiccup paints it,
Astrid's hair is just amazing.
There's a lot of really complex hair-on-hair interaction,
and hair with objects...
Damon Crowe in the character effects department, which is...
So a lot of the interaction between the characters and the environment
is done in a separate department.
They do grass and the ferns and the hair and the cloth.
And basically, animate a lot of these objects
that makes the characters also feel more believable,
because there's true interaction.
The department is led by Damon Crowe.
And I think we had a pretty large number of character effects artists on this film.
There's so much of that happening.
It's okay.
This shot says a lot about Hiccup's mindset.
He was so proud to send him off
and determined to help facilitate this bond between Toothless and Light Fury,
but suddenly realizes and feels quite naked without him when he flies off.
You always described that moment as the mother sending their kids to school,
- the first day of school. - Putting them on the school bus.
And the moment after the bus drives away...
- Yeah. - ...doesn't quite know
what to do with herself.
This was just a quick moment that we put in
to help with the pacing of the movie,
and to remind the audience that Grimmel is continuing his pursuit.
And so it's staged as an attack,
but then we see that he calls off his Deathgrippers
because he wants them to come.
He's baiting a trap.
And it's a nice pairing, actually, with this sequence,
which was storyboarded by Simon Otto,
and it's a beautiful pantomime sequence of Toothless
tracking down the Light Fury after an exhaustive search
and is ready to give up.
Then he hears that distant sound of her blasting her fireball.
I think they work really well, having the peril
and then kind of the romance side-by-side,
just kind of shows the two paths we're on.
It's a tricky thing to storyboard a sequence,
and then work on the sequence as it goes through production
because you have very specific ideas of what it is...
I remember, Simon, yes.
"What about this?" "No, no, no."
Yeah, you lose sight of what it can be,
because you're so focused on how you think it should be.
A lot of creative ownership.
I think it's actually a good experience to go through
because, as a director, I often have pretty clear ideas
about how I envision a moment.
But as you move through and you start to work with other artists,
you see that that idea changes and morphs,
and sometimes you think,
"Maybe not for the better, but generally for the better."
And it's just part of a collaborative effort
of putting it up on screen.
It's like you kind of have to embrace the idea
that it's a team effort.
Everybody brings to it their best,
and what they think are the winning ideas,
and it's not necessarily always the way you pictured it.
Give people a chance to really add
to the ideas that you would have not come up with.
Yeah.
The great thing about several of these first beats
of these moments between Light Fury and Toothless...
One of the reasons Toothless, I think, works so well is
we thrust him into situations that we relate to, right?
He's been trying to impress the Light Fury who he met,
even he's out searching for her.
It's like he's cruising Main Street,
just hoping to see her in a car or something like that.
Then he's here trying to impress her with his strength and abilities.
We can all sort of see ourselves,
some memory, some situation where we're trying to impress somebody.
It's so fun.
So, we're aware that the aurora borealis does not come out on a moonlit night.
Hey, but it's here for fantasy.
And this is the idea that...
We wanted to introduce this waterfall at the edge of the world,
as Stoick described it,
without indicating that it's actually the volcanic caldera.
It's not a circular formation, it just appears to be a waterfall.
Or you could think of it as the edge of the world.
Yes, which Stoick described in his flashback.
So that's all we're giving you of that at this point.
We wanted to keep the mystery.
That moment of talons and talons on talons
spinning into the abyss
was a scene we had tried to put
- in, I think, almost every... - Yeah.
...one of the movies.
Yeah, you had that idea for when Valka meets Hiccup.
Yeah, which is a great reference.
A couple of eagles locking talons, tumbling off.
But this case, we have the black and white, yin-yang.
- Yeah, I know. It was perfect. - It was just beautiful.
Some beautiful animation here, through with Fabio Lignini.
I love how natural and relatable Hiccup is with his worry.
He's immediately casting doubt on the Light Fury.
His anxiety over being the third wheel in this relationship
is coming through here.
And it's believable, it remains entertaining,
both the way these two characters interact is always really fun.
...and let Toothless stretch his wings.
Reminds me of a talk I had with Stoick about you.
Where do they keep coming from?
- Who? - Those bloody Hobgobblers.
I love the idea that Tuffnut was just in that tent.
He just pops out of the tent for no reason.
This was one of the gags that we were a little worried about.
Because, of course, we embrace and celebrate the idea
of Hiccup and Gobber and others being heroes
with their prosthetics and their amputations,
but I think in this case, we didn't know if we had maybe gone too far.
That's part of why we screened the movie for the Amputee Coalition.
And that, by the way, was the biggest laugh
of the entire screening with them.
This is all because of the Hobgobblers.
He has 100 ships, maybe more.
Another moment you tinkered with quite a bit, Dean,
like how to get in and out of this sequence,
and get this information...
It was much longer, but we realized
that we were explaining to the audience what they had already seen.
And so we cut it short, and we really just wanted to set up a test for Hiccup.
Now that Toothless is nowhere to be found,
Hiccup has to make a tough decision as a leader.
And we wanted this sequence to be an exciting and gripping depiction
of Hiccup's plan
without Toothless and how badly it goes awry.
It's meant to be confirmation for Hiccup, ultimately,
that he cannot lead without Toothless.
Another incredibly difficult and beautiful lighting sequence,
and that combination of the Digimatte matte painting
in the opening scene is just...
The atmosphere and depth and detail and transformation of the audience
into what the scene feels like is just... The team is just amazing.
So, this was meant to be, we really never said so in the film,
but this was meant to be an old trapper's fort.
It's just sitting there, abandoned,
and Grimmel's now using it as the basis for his trap.
So, the entire armada, the warlord's armada
is surrounding the island.
And Grimmel baits the dragon riders closer
with that lit window.
And the whole thing is just a trap, waiting to be deployed.
These are always tricky moments in movies when you have your villain monologuing,
but we realize that we had to get a certain amount out and
this is probably the best time to do it, now that he has a captive audience here.
Really, we needed to show how they were similar.
But ultimately,
Grimmel has a reputation to protect, but it's founded on this idea of
having made the very opposite choice
the first time he came face-to-face with the Night Fury,
the opposite of Hiccup's.
So I decided to kill every last one...
We also realized in early screenings, that people didn't understand
how it was that Grimmel could control his Deathgrippers.
And that's what this line is about.
That nonsense dies now. Starting with you.
But you have dragons of your own.
These?
They're dragon killers,
drugged into obedience with their own venom.
Not even your precious alpha could control them.
They serve me and only me.
Allow me to demonstrate.
Take cover!
Talk about your action film choreography.
Early on we were encouraged by Chris and Donna
to really lean into the action on these scenes
and this sequence certainly shows that.
Amazing escape,
great shots that have to travel north while they're being chased out.
The Deathgrippers were animated, or led, by Liron Topaz,
and he put a lot of thought into how they move around
on those claws and pincers and heavy-armored scales across the backs.
It was meant to be monstrous things, and I think the way they lunge
and attack with their retractable tusks
just makes them something out of a nightmare.
I love how Hiccup made the bad decision to do the surprise attack
and Valka and Astrid basically save his bacon by getting him out of there.
Which absolutely serves the story mission.
We need to show that Hiccup's confidence
is really shaken by nearly getting everyone killed,
and in fact, leaving one of them behind.
Can't make that reaction.
Again, this is a really nice, bold choice of the color palette,
coming into the camp of New Berk after that fiery escape.
It feels perfectly dawn, wet and dewy.
And it's a nice depiction of this place that we haven't seen before.
I really applaud POV and Dave Walvoord and Roger Deakins
for establishing some really beautiful looks for the film.
Okay, guys, just keep your helmets on.
Toothless and I will find her.
Toothless has the Light Fury now.
He's probably not even coming back.
What?
You gave him his freedom, Hiccup.
What were you expecting?
I remember when we talked about the decision of,
"Should we have Ruffnut captured?
"Should she be back at the part with Grimmel?"
And we all thought, "This could be hilarious," right?
Because she is such a...
She'd be a tough one and she's so arrogant, full of herself
like she is, and then...
Dean, you wrote a really long scene
for Kristen to do and riff her way through,
but what a fun idea, just the idea of, "We're gonna take Ruffnut,
"we're gonna stick her in a cage alongside of Grimmel,
"and we'll see what happens."
Everybody, stay put.
If I recall correctly, actually, Brad, this was your idea
that Ruffnut would get left behind as a captive,
that, ultimately, he just lets go because she's driving him mad.
Fun idea.
- Annoy her way to freedom. - Yeah.
Do you have a twin, too?
Tuffnut took up all the room in Mom's belly.
Otherwise I'd have a rounder head and more brains.
That's science.
I think people are divided about this scene.
Some people who can't stand people who won't stop talking
are quite easily irritated by Ruffnut here.
But that's exactly the intent we needed them to understand.
Why he let her go.
It gives the veracity to him letting her go, right, then...
All within his plan.
But just like having a sequence where you have
the pantomime animation and music to carry it,
it's nice to also have a sequence like this
where it's relied purely on just the comedic timing of our actors
and some beautiful animation to accompany it.
The animators had a blast with these scenes.
The contrast between his reaction and her just going on and on.
One thing I'll say that people might not know,
if you look at the three warlords, the big guy...
We've got Ragnar the Rock,
we've got Chaghatai Khan and we've got Griselda the Grevious.
Those bodies are actually Stoick, Eret and Valka,
with different faces and different costumes.
We were sort of running up against it, and we didn't have time
to really design completely new characters from scratch.
So we gave ourselves the mission of taking bodies that we already had,
giving them new costumes and new faces.
And that's how we ended up with three new characters to represent our warlords.
Yeah, in order to create this rich world with so many characters
that we've accumulated over the three movies,
we had to be really creative in how we use our resources
to create this world, this vast world.
And that was one of the tricks we came up with.
So long, losers!
It could be argued that Hiccup has really bad eyesight.
Because this is the second time in the movie when he flies up
and seems to be the last to notice a massive landmark in front of them...
Mile-and-a-half gaping hole in the ocean.
Yeah.
I'd just love to quickly talk about the work
that the animators did and we did together to learn to animate flying creatures.
Right now you should probably be talking about the effects.
That's a good point. That's a good point. Touché.
The caldera is one of the most amazing effects shots
- that has ever been done in animation. - Yeah, it really is incredible.
Breathtaking.
- But if you want to talk about flying... - Yeah, we will, we will.
- Put a pin into that one. - It is really impressive.
The idea of the caldera as the entrance to the Hidden World,
it was a dream I had and I talked to POV about it,
and he did a painting, making sense of this idea of a hole in the sea
as a massive gaping caldera that rises to the sea surface
and the water would be spilling in, in 360 degrees.
And if you were to fly down through that,
you would find your way into this network of tunnels
that would open up into caverns, vast spaces that would be lit
in an ethereal way with bioluminescence,
either in the fungi or through the dragons themselves
that take on a different patterned look in this environment,
as though flying under a black light.
We wanted it to be vast so you wouldn't really have a sense
of what's the top or what's the bottom.
That it would be a home
to nurseries of dragons and pods,
new dragons that we hadn't seen.
And the idea that the water would be interacting with magma down below
would create such a steamy atmosphere
that you would even start to see coral growing in midair.
Just as a location, it was really challenging
to design but especially execute.
I know that Dave Walvoord talked about this
being the most difficult thing in the film to bring to life.
It's a super tricky design conceit to come up with a mythical place on Earth
that doesn't feel so fantastical that it's out of keeping with this
really, basically, a naturalistic conceit for a movie.
So, by tethering it with biological reality
like bioluminescence and steam and water and everything,
really brings an organic quality to it that really makes you think,
- "Maybe there is some..." - It's a fine line to walk, right?
- Yeah. - Yeah.
All right, Simon.
Now they're walking.
Well, I could just quickly talk about that.
So, every animator had to go through two weeks of what we called "flight school,"
where they had to do very specific test shots.
One was just flying in air where you don't see any background
and just have to sell the presence of air.
And, by the way, the crowds animators had to do that, too,
just to understand how the physics of flight work
and how to sell it.
It's definitely a great learning experience
for all of us to go through that,
and I think it pays off 'cause it's really challenging in animation
to sell that air is there and exists and carries these really heavy creatures,
give them weight and dimension.
Well, that certainly works in this sequence.
This is the realization of what we had talked about.
We didn't just want a cave.
We'd seen that in the first movie.
We'd seen a more idyllic cave in the second film,
in the Bewilder beast's lair where we meet Valka.
But this was meant to be a world.
The idea that the Hidden World
would be connected through pockets of vast chambers and tunnels
beneath the crust of the Earth,
running under the oceans, under the continents,
interconnected all the way around.
So, you might find different access points throughout the world.
But if the dragons were gonna go away
at the end of our story, as we had planned,
we wanted it to feel like a place that was inviting for them,
that would be idyllic for dragons and that would be inhospitable to humans.
That little dance ritual that Toothless and Light Fury do here
was, for us, the scene that would describe it now.
They've come together
and Toothless knows what to do and how to answer her movements.
Yeah, it's a really nice kind of bookend to that.
This is one of my favorite shots because we've always seen
Hiccup put the hand up when he tames the dragon.
In this case, he throws it up there and the dragon's like,
"Not having any of it."
It's completely defeated.
And even Astrid goes, "This is not gonna work, man."
That's a really fun, dynamic escape.
Makes you think of a theme park thrill ride.
Escape from the Hidden World.
Go! Go!
It's a nice balance and that was the challenge
of how do we take a moment that's both awe-inspiring
and then turn it into something that's ultimately sad through Hiccup's eyes?
'Cause he sees that Toothless has found his place
and he's no longer needed here.
And then before they can really... Before we can leave it on a downer,
there's this hurried escape,
facilitated by Toothless.
So, of the six flashbacks, this second one was the most poignant
and the least on the nose, in a way.
We had some other flashbacks
that were maybe a little too relevant to what was going on in the present.
But this is thematically what the movie is all about,
is this idea that with love comes loss and that it's part of the deal.
It's true of life, and it's being depicted in our story.
It's ultimately, I think, the truth that Hiccup comes to accept
and embrace by the end of the movie.
And with that comes a certain amount of joy.
It's part of life, moving on.
I don't want another.
One of the things that
I loved that, Dean, you tackled in this
is it's a mature idea.
It's a very mature idea to put into a movie to say
when you love something, that you are going to have to...
That there's loss, you're going to have to consider letting go of it,
that maybe the right thing is something that you don't really want.
It's a beautiful conceit.
It's counter-intuitive because it's ultimately selfless
and it's harder to switch to that mode when you need someone.
This is a sequence that... I just love watching it
because of the work that the team put into bringing the environment to life.
It's just a gentle breeze that's moving through the grass
and the tree limbs in the background, through the hair.
And it has such a fine-tuned finish to it that just blows me away,
because in the 10 years that we've been working on these movies,
the technology has grown with us and it's reached a point where
I think I can honestly say, if you can imagine it,
if you can imagine an image on screen, it can be created now.
There doesn't seem to be any limitation, given the tools that we have.
We never would've done four-foot tall grasses in a...
We couldn't have made that choice in the past.
And this is testament to, if your allergies are psychosomatic,
this series of shots might induce hay fever.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
That's it.
Yeah!
- Ruffnut? - Miss me?
How did you escape?
I annoyed them till they let me go.
Wait. Wait. Grimmel let you go?
So dumb.
They couldn't handle me.
See, everyone thinks Tuffnut's more annoying, but...
I like this moment because, Hiccup, in past versions of the script,
I had written him to be a lot more selfish and it was pretty unlikable.
He came back having declared his presence in the Hidden World,
commanding Toothless to come to him and dragging him back.
And everyone else was calling him out on it.
And it was just a low moment for Hiccup where he certainly wasn't being heroic.
But I thought the intention was to have it be his dark moment
of being ultimately really selfish and that causing Toothless' capture.
But in refining it and through the help of the team
and screenings that we had,
we came to realize that simply having him realize
that he didn't belong in the Hidden World
and that Toothless clearly did, that was actually enough
because the Light Fury's appearance
caused him to regress really rapidly.
He was reaching a moment of selflessness.
And then when the Light Fury appeared, he thought,
"Great, I don't have to go there. We can all be together."
He can have his cake and eat it, too,
and that's right on the heels of Grimmel's attack.
So ultimately, it still does the same function.
It still leaves Hiccup feeling responsible for Toothless' capture,
and it drives him toward his third act epiphany
that he needs to do something.
He needs to lay it all out to get Toothless back and reverse what he's done.
You tried your best.
But you are nothing without your dragon.
That was really nicely handled, I thought.
When you're working with dragons,
you don't wanna make them too anthropomorphic, in this case.
And so it was, "How do we communicate that Toothless is commanding his flock
"to not attack and ultimately follow?"
It was challenging, but the animators managed to pull it off.
I think it's clear in pantomime that he has a sense of strategy
and that he is having them bide their time until there's a better plan.
Great. Now what?
I think it's time for number two to become number one.
He'll listen to you.
This was meant to be a bit of a callback to the first movie, as well,
Hiccup and Astrid standing on the cliff after Stoick had sailed off
with Toothless to find the nest.
It's another moment where she's come to his aid when he's feeling most defeated,
to remind him that he's more than he thinks of himself.
He actually has this tenacity in him
that was there long before he met Toothless
and ultimately she's dredging that up.
They are the perfect complement for one another, really.
She gives him that tenacity.
He wouldn't have it, I don't think, without Astrid, right?
That's what she helps light inside him.
And I think for her, he helps not just act like a warrior all the time.
He thinks things through.
They really are a perfect complement as a couple, which is the other thing...
Throughout this story, we're trying to set up all of those things
so they build to a place where we believe in both of them as a set
to lead the Vikings of Berk.
At last, faithful pupil, you are ready.
How are we gonna get our dragons back?
Once again Pablo and the team, the lighting on this is just amazing.
The crowds work, James Thornton and the crowds team,
there's a master strategy to each one of these sequences,
whether it's the lighting temperature up on top of the island,
down below by the armada,
and where the dragons are coming in, where the dragons are leaving.
Tracking the continuity over four or five minutes of screen time
so that the directions of the dragons and the numbers
that you see shot-by-shot that actually feels like a real continuity.
And those guys did a really big job and challenging job to get that right.
Let's go!
Here's where the benefit of having a really tall island helps us out.
'Cause using the wingsuits, they're able to make their way down
to the armada, which is conveniently placed just off the shore of the island.
So, it allows them a heroic plan to hurtle in there,
try to stop what's going on without dragons.
Well, it's funny, we always have these conversations about
hundreds of different aspects in the movie, but it's like,
"Hey, where did they get their wingsuits?"
It's like, "Should we show them making them earlier in the movie
"so we know that they put them on or..."
It's like, sometimes it's just a little bit of movie magic.
There's one indication of it in the beginning, actually,
in the opening sequence when Fishlegs flies in,
when he crashes to the deck, he says, "I'm still getting the hang of my wings."
That was intentionally there to help set up without broadcasting it, that,
- "We all have these wingsuits..." - And we tend to overthink it, too,
- and then... - Yeah.
Explain it too much, and then cut it back out,
and then find out whether the audience is getting it or they're confused by it.
This is also meant to be a payoff of the earlier idea that
they as a team don't work very well together without their dragons.
And so, here they are, finally covering each other's backs
and working together, and saving the dragons
instead of the dragons saving them.
So, here we have some of the most complex scenes
that I've ever worked on in animation,
that feel much more like visual effects shots,
where the camera is incredibly kinetic and moving all the time.
And you have elements on multiple layers, and you try to sell gravity
and readability at the same time,
particularly the shots where Grimmel... Where the airship starts falling apart
and Hiccup is trying to free Toothless while he's on there,
these shots are about to come up,
and just to make it read and have the story track,
like in these sections here.
It's a big challenge, and we're not really used to, in character animation,
to stage shots like this.
Like swinging elements and delivering dialogue, and...
It was a real challenge, and we took quite a bit of time to get these right.
And you always... In animation,
even though you think the camera is doing the right thing
when they come out of layout,
once the performance is in there and the action's in there,
you have to adjust the cameras again,
and then you have to adjust the animation again.
So, you chase each other's tails.
Very, very, very tricky shots to get right and to make them read
and then you throw it over to effects and lighting
and they have to then also make sure that it reads.
And at first when you conceive these scenes, you don't know exactly
how all these elements are gonna come together,
so you constantly react to what you're seeing and you build as you go.
Yeah!
Number two coming through.
Surprise.
Sorry about that.
Come on.
One more free. Four to go.
Here again, this is one of the examples of just how well the team's working together.
I got your backs.
Out of the way!
Yeah, it's almost like we're a team.
Once again, John Carr, our editor, and the team came up with
great ways of crosscutting the action so that
we could tell both sides of the story.
Hiccup rescuing Toothless, going after the Light Fury,
and then the team working together on the deck
to turn back this armada.
Now, if you noticed earlier, Toothless commands Cloudjumper,
Skullcrusher and Grump to go back to the island.
And that's them arriving with Valka, Eret and Gobber.
Very subtle, but that's how we explain how they arrive.
The lightning flashes here are just to help set up how Toothless
is going to ultimately defeat the Deathgrippers.
So, there's passing storm activity...
How are we gonna get him off her back without hurting her?
That really made him mad.
The worst thing that could happen to him.
Such a silly idea played out for all it's worth.
Character who can't grow a beard.
- That's one... Hair all over his face. - And this is the resolution
- to the Gobber-Hobgobbler storyline. - The Hobgobblers, yeah.
Yeah, their growing numbers actually had a little payoff.
It wasn't a bad omen for him, it was a bad omen for...
- The warlords. - Yeah.
And that was my favorite shot. Astrid, the backhanded chop.
It was just awesome.
This is where the team always surprises me because we'll see
these shots in storyboards, and then they become pretty amazing
in pre-viz during the layout phase.
When you see them fully realized once the effects team has had their way
and lighting's done their thing, man...
Just the scale and the destruction. It's fantastic.
So, here they are in the spires, the snow-capped spires of New Berk.
We have six Deathgrippers,
two of them went down with the burning ship.
Now he's got these two he's temporarily dealt with,
and then the other two that make up the six.
And now he's got four on his tail, and we needed a way to get rid of them
'cause they're pretty formidable.
And we thought, "Well, Light Fury taught him how to cloak."
But for Toothless, it took more than a fireball, it took an arc of electricity.
When we saw these shots coming out of the story, and they...
We didn't know how we were gonna do this
because you have black dragons that jump a black dragon
and it's night and flashing lights.
- See, that was your shot. - Yeah, cool.
That came together well on screen.
I actually hadn't seen this shot.
- The idea is that the... - That shot we changed.
The shot you changed last-minute.
That lightning bolt not only did away with the four Deathgrippers,
but it was enough to cloak both Toothless and Hiccup,
'cause Hiccup's wearing Toothless scales.
And ultimately, it comes down to this,
that Hiccup was willing to give up his own life
so that Toothless could be safe with the Light Fury.
He knew that he'd be safer with her.
This is.
And intentionally we wanted Hiccup to start to lose all of his add-ons.
That's my favorite shot right there.
- Beautiful. Beautiful effects. - That's just gorgeous slow motion.
Yeah, with the change in perspective
- as we fall down. - Grimmel will rip away the wings
and Hiccup's already lost his dragon blade,
there's all these bits and pieces that he's supplemented.
They all fall away until he himself detaches the last one.
And that becomes Grimmel's demise.
The design of that, in terms of the sound design,
we wanted music to take over when it goes into slow motion,
and for that piercing missile sound that is the trademark sound of Toothless,
and as it turns out, the Light Fury as well,
that would pierce the music and bring us back to real time.
Yeah!
This was a little tricky, in that,
by the time you have that victory moment coming out of the climax of the movie,
I think the audiences are ready to just pack it up,
and get out of their seats and head home,
but we still have a bit of storytelling to do here,
so we had to keep it moving.
We couldn't linger on anything for too long,
just keep the audience in their seats and let them know
that there's more that's going to happen.
And actually the most poignant moments of the movie are coming up.
So it was...
The most poignant moments in the trilogy, really.
That was really the demand of, Dean, you saying,
"Let's make it a trilogy," is there's more endings here.
We need to wrap up relationships, we need to wrap up everything.
And so, there's a lot of completions that are demanded
by your aspiration to do a trilogy.
And I think the first time you talked about the trilogy to me, at least,
I remember you talking about that bittersweet ending.
- Yes. Yeah. - Yeah.
Sort of the driving engines of your desire to make it into a trilogy.
You're right, bud. It's time.
I was so busy fighting for a world...
The dragon animation here is just beautiful, I think.
There is so much being communicated.
We know that Toothless has a great loyalty to Hiccup,
but he also knows that he doesn't belong there anymore,
that there's something awaiting him in the distance.
And so when he looks out to that horizon and back to Hiccup,
he's really saying, "Is it time?"
And Hiccup understands, he's been with Toothless for so long
that he knows what that look means.
So, I think what's being communicated, even though Hiccup is speaking,
is largely understood between Toothless and Hiccup.
Like the other dragons might be a little confused as to what's going on,
they're all having their saddles removed.
Centrally...
Essentially, I think our central cast, they all understand what's happening.
And if Hiccup's gonna go through with it,
then they, in solidarity, are going to let go as well.
It was all building up to the moment
of that hand coming away from Toothless's muzzle.
Wanted to repeat that in reverse.
'Cause it was such an iconic moment from the first movie,
and it seemed like a nice bookend to be able to say goodbye that way.
Our world doesn't deserve you.
Yet.
So, hats off to Dane Stogner and the team who handled Toothless.
I think there's just some really gorgeous stuff here.
And, honestly, that tear is an artful tear as well.
We sort of...
It's not the main focus of the shot.
And as soon as you realize it, the tear is running down his face,
you realize, it's sort of happened.
It's a beautiful, I think, choice of how to play that.
It's a delicate thing to bring the audience to this moment
where they accept that this is the right course of action.
Yeah, that was the great challenge in all of this,
we recognize that our fans really like Toothless and Hiccup together,
and the other characters with their dragons.
So, how were we going to tell a story in which the dragons go away at the end?
And not have those fans hate us for it.
Hopefully, we've accomplished that.
Hopefully, we've taken the audience on a journey where they understand
that this was, ultimately, the only solution and the right solution.
And that Hiccup's sacrifice is inspiring.
That was the idea.
Really, it all comes down to...
The ultimate inspiration behind all of this
was meeting Cressida Cowell, toward the end
of the making of the first movie.
And she said that her last book was gonna tackle
the disappearance of dragons and why they aren't here anymore.
And I thought that was really gripping and emotional.
So, even though the narratives are quite different between the films and the books,
I thought it was a worthy goal for the end of the movie,
to suggest a time in which dragons roamed this world
and that they had disappeared,
and their whereabouts is a mystery.
I really loved the idea of getting to that
opening line of Cressida's first book,
which is Hiccup, as an older man, reflecting back on his youth.
And the line is, "There were dragons when I was a boy."
I thought that was quite stirring and so,
the goal of the end of this movie and this trilogy
was to try to take us to that place
where he could be reflecting back with fondness.
So, what I'd imagined was our group gathered together on a cliff, looking out
on a horizon that's no longer teeming with dragons,
and over that we would hear those opening lines,
and that's exactly what we have coming up.
- It's so beautiful! - Gross.
Okay, you win.
I like sensitive guys.
There was also a goal to have a Viking funeral and a Viking wedding
in this trilogy.
And so, that moment fulfilled that goal.
This shot was an intentional callback to Hiccup.
The close-up on Hiccup when he was in Stoick's arms in that first flashback,
we wanted to repeat it
and kind of dupe the audience, so they expect to see Stoick,
and in fact they see a grown Hiccup, now 10 years later.
What's fun about one of the conceits of this epilogue
is there's these little cards where curtains were pulling back,
"Oh, is that young Hiccup?"
"Oh, my gosh, it's his son. Oh, they have a son and a daughter."
And then, "What? They're back on the edge of the caldera,"
and then, ultimately, the reveal of the dragon babies,
which is just the cutest thing on earth.
We call them Nightlights, because they're a combination, of course,
of the Night Fury and the Light Fury.
And we wanted them to have a combination of traits.
So, if you look at them closely, they'll have some of Toothless's features,
some of the Light Fury's features, as well.
You always talked about the scene in Born Free at the end
when the lioness returns to the human village...
Yeah. Yeah.
And I think Christian the lion,
and there's so many videos of trainers
and people who had had interactions
- with either big cats or... Gorillas. - Gorillas.
Going back years later and having that moment of reconnection.
The time it takes to realize
and for the animal to realize that that's somebody they know.
- It's really powerful. - Yeah, it's really heartwarming.
This next shot, I think it was rough layout,
in our early screenings,
had this super frightened little girl, the expression,
and the audience used to crack up every time it looked at her,
and it made its way over into an idea for the animation.
It was really cute.
Also, the boy hiding his head under Astrid's cape,
that was an idea brought by the animator, Alena.
- Yeah. - And it really worked.
We were trying to play the kids as the inverse of their parents.
- Yes. - So that the girl
is the nerdy kid that draws and takes notes,
and the boy is the blond...
And a brash adventurer. Yeah.
So, this sequence, also, definitely softens
the blow of saying goodbye to the dragons, to know that they went back there,
had one last joy ride with them,
were able to have their kids experience what they'd experienced,
flying on the backs of the dragons.
And even a reunion with Astrid and Stormfly.
Right, we wanted a bittersweet ending,
but we didn't want to depress our audience either,
and I think this really helps leave people feeling hopeful
and like they went on the rollercoaster of emotion.
But, hopefully, come out in a positive way.
Yes, the world believes the dragons are gone...
And just this idea that
the dragons could still be waiting there for us,
once we figure out our own problems as human beings.
There's something uplifting and joyful about that, as well.
Lastly, the concept for these end credits
is that we wanted to revisit the relationship.
So, we went right back to Hiccup and Toothless
having their first moment of communion and that first contact
and getting to know one another.
And it's just moments throughout all three movies,
connected together against a beautiful song by Jónsi,
who's been part of all three films writing music for us.
I think that the lyrics are particularly poignant.
Well, we always talk about in these movies,
there's tons of individual accomplishment,
but that the incredible reflection, really, after you watch the movie...
Even now, as we watched it all together, it's just...
It's 275-300 people coming together,
and none is greater than the other.
No, really, contribution is any greater than the other.
It's really an amalgamation of dedicated people trying to make great ideas.
And it's not really... Limitations weren't a function of budget.
They're probably a function of time, more than anything else,
but just great folks trying to do great things
that they're gonna be proud of 20 years from now.
And if you removed one element, it doesn't hold up.
All these pieces had to come together to be able to create these movies.
And at the end of it, I think we're at a moment
where we're beginning to look back and realize what an accomplishment it was
for all of us to be together for 10 years.
Largely the same team.
We had new people that joined us for each of the installments,
but a lot of the same key players.
And this has been a part of our lives for 10 years.
We've worked together as a team.
We've watched these characters grow up on screen together.
And so, not only are the characters within the story saying goodbye,
but we are saying goodbye to these characters as well.
And to one another.
Who knows if we will be together, working on another film
in the same capacity?
And everything's unknown from here on out,
but I think it's been an amazing, wonderful 10 years of growth
and friendship and inspiration.
I'm very thankful.
All right, this is Dean DeBlois, signing out.
Hope you enjoyed our commentary and learned a few things about the movie.
Yeah, and this is Brad, as well,
and just thanks to everybody for watching the movie, loving the movie.
We put it out there like our children, and we hope that they're loved.
Thanks for the incredible support we had from DreamWorks.
You can see how many credits are going by.
It's an incredible organization of dedicated folks.
Yeah. I think we should really say thank you to the studio
giving us the chance to work on a trilogy like this.
I think it's very rare in a career to have an opportunity
to work on something like this and make it such an amazing place, so...
I'm Simon Otto, and I'd like to sign out as well.
Thanks for listening.