Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1079787
F E AT U R E Such was the case with the artists working on How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, the third feature film in the franchise—and one that benefited from employing many of the same crew members since the first chapter of DreamWorks Animation's 3D computer-animated story broke barriers on the medium's capabilities nearly a decade ago. This allowed for a deep understanding of how these characters and their worlds had to seem like natural extensions of the preceding films. "It's amazing just how you can connect with an audience using these tools and tech- niques we have at our disposal," says Dean DeBlois, who directed all three films. "In CG animation, we have improved controls every year and [now] every character has thou- sands of controls built into them, that the animators can use to create the most subtle of expressions," DeBlois says, explaining that the time can now be spent on emotion- al gratification rather than accuracy because "the transitions between those expressions become just completely smooth." For this film, DeBlois and his crew had to seamlessly master the arts of story trajectory, production design and advancing digital technology to further let their audience into a secret (or forgotten) world where beasts soar through the air, Vikings quest, and a man's best friend can take him for a ride into the stars before dragons left humans for the safety of their own world. ANIMATED CHARACTERS THAT COME ALIVE The third film, which premiers February 22, completes the saga of a young Viking named Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), who goes from an awkward, gangly protagonist to become the thoughtful, protective leader that is his destiny. But it also shows Hiccup in two other stages of life, thanks to flashbacks to him as a boy even younger than he was when the movie franchise started and eventually showing him as a grown man with a family of his own. All these designs had to both match each other and stay true to how the character looked in the previous films. DeBlois says it would be a disservice to the character to suddenly have him grow to look like the 300-pound burly men who populate his colony, so "we tried to maintain that idea that he's always going to be lean and spry but his tenacity would remain in place so that he could always be in a different mindset—a forward-thinker." Hiccup's also an amputee, having lost part of his leg at the end of the first movie. Although he walks with a (quite stylish) peg leg, this affects how he moves as he ages. It's also something the staff took great care to get right, lest they unintentionally offend any fans. Simon Otto, Dragon's Head of Character Animation, says the fact that Hiccup treats his prosthetic as almost like a Swiss Army knife of gadgetry "opened up opportunities from a design point of view." They also talked to disability advocacy groups about this aspect and whether certain language was appropriate and would not offend. 32 KEYFRAME