How to Train Your Dragon’s Director Details Updating The Dragons for Live-Action
The How to Train Your Dragon director walks us through how they made the live-action dragons as real as possible.
Back in February 2023 when it was announced that Universal Pictures was developing a live-action How to Train Your Dragon with Dean DeBlois (Lilo & Stitch) returning to direct, there was great joy and concern at once. On one hand, fans were thrilled that the co-director of the animated classic was coming back to the Isle of Berk. On the other hand, could a live-action version match the original?
DeBlois was just as concerned so he spent a year and $50 million on pre-production development figuring out how to recreate Berk, Toothless and all the dragons in a real world film and make them as impressive as everyone hoped they could be.
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Well, it’s certainly paid off with a stable full of dragons, including Gronckles, Deadly Nadders, Monstrous Nightmares and a Night Fury, that will make you believe that they actually exist.
How did the whole team achieve peak realism? DeBlois recently sat down with NBC Insider and explained that through a variety of techniques — including CG, practical effects and puppetry — they were able to create the most tactile and authentic dragons tailor made to this version of Berk.
Bringing different dragon species to life in How to Train Your Dragon
In the original animated feature adaptation of Cressida Cowell's How to Train Your Dragon books, co-directors DeBlois and Chris Sanders (The Wild Robot) and head of character animation Simon Otto (That Christmas) established the illustrated, stylized interpretation of Berk’s dragons as seen in the books.
For the live-action remake, DeBlois said he wanted to go more grounded with the Vikings, Berk and the realism of the dragons that “plague" their lands.
"Cressida Cowell did the genius thing of having many different species, all with very specific personalities, visual traits and abilities, DeBlois explained. "But it's the temperaments that give them so much character and so much on screen presence. And so we started with that idea that even though we had some quite cartoonish designs in the animated films, we should work backward to the animal that inspired those designs."
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DeBlois said they went back to actual animal kingdom references to start reworking the dragon designs for real life.
"We started thinking about their animal references very closely, whether it be a crocodile, or a tropical bird, or a walrus or a black panther in the case of Toothless,” he detailed. “We really studies those animals. We tried to get all of that subtlety of skeletal and musculature definition, the iridescence of scales, all of those little details that in animation you would simplify for a more stylized design."
Framestore visual effects and computer animation studio was chosen to be the primary vendor that would actualize Toothless and the training dragons against the human actors.
“They are known for very whimsical and lovely creature animation in Paddington or the world of Harry Potter,” DeBlois said of the studio's high-end, CG character work.
"With that wonderful skill and imagination, we also brought in [animation supervisor] Glen McIntosh,” he continued. "He has a background at Industrial Light and Magic where he had worked on Jurassic Park films. He's very studied in paleontology.”
DeBlois explained the two hires allowed them to stitch together the needed elements to make the dragons work.
“We asked how do we get a large, lumbering creature that's very convincing in a live-action world, while preserving all of the personality and whimsy of the Framestore team?” he explained. “It turned out to be a great marriage. They actually makes these creatures not only feel believable, but they still retain a lot of personality."
When it comes to riding a dragon, puppetry adds that extra level of realism
Because the live-action How to Train Your Dragon features a lot of human actors riding CG dragons, there’s no credible way to make that look real without animating the humans to match the CG dragons and that never comes across well. What DeBlois and his team did was build “rideable” puppet dragons for the scenes where humans and dragons were flying the skies together.
Per the Dragon production notes, they created digital sculpts that were built by the VFX team, "giving actors realistic, tangible points of interaction during filming.” When it came to Toothless who interacted often with Hiccup (Mason Thames), they constructed multiple heads, each designed for specific actions in the story. They had a ‘hero’ head that was puppeteered so Mason and Toothless could act with each other. They also made a ‘wrestle’ head for the more explosive action sequences. Altogether, five puppeteers worked together to bring Toothless to life, with three extra puppeteers just to operate his tail, one controlling the head and another managing the torso.
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For the other dragon species and their riders, like Snotlout (Gabriel Howell) who tames and then rides the Monstrous Nightmare, they too learned to perform with puppetry incarnations of their dragons. He said it was surreal to spend time on his dragon because the puppeteers went “Method” in performing it.
“They would be living and breathing in between takes as well,” he detailed. "The puppeteers wouldn't set the dragons down so they would sort of be like huffing and shaking, especially towards the end of the shoot. Just like the characters, the more you're with them, the more you understand how to lean on a dragon, or where it feels nice to put your hands on them, like on the head or where it's smooth like a horse's face. By the end, if you lent on the dragon between takes, they'd sort of shake you off. And you're like, ‘Fair! Sorry, you are real. That's true.’”
How to Train Your Dragon soars onto the big screen Friday, June 13. Tickets are on sale here!
