Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1540269
12 cgw j u ly • a u g u s t • s e p t e m b e r 2 0 2 5 There was obviously a large amount of clean-up required in post, but we were always very careful not to occlude the actors, and the shoot crew got very used to shooting clean plates. This extra work was far outweighed by the authentic connection between human and dragon that the puppeteers created for us. For flight, a different approach was required. Working with SFX, we created bespoke articulated bucks sat on top of a six-axis gimbal for each of our key dragons. The overall body motion came from the gimbal, while the buck was separated into a head, neck, and shoul- ders, whose movement matched the animated flight cycles created by Framestore. "Reference from the natural world was key to the believability of all of the dragon designs—be it crocodiles for the Monstrous Nightmare or ostriches for the Deadly Nadder..." The innovation with the dragon gimbals was the ability to not only play back a flight cycle accurately, but also to blend between differ- ent ones, live on set. The gimbal and buck motion could be sepa- rated and driven by different cycles, or be puppeteered via a Waldo control system. For every setup, we could rehearse with a selected cycle and then tweak the action by either changing to a different cy- cle, altering its speed or, most importantly, working off what the ac- tors were doing—if Mason pulled at Toothless' collar, we could follow him and make the rig bank. The result was hopefully more authentic and organic because of the happy accidents that happen in performance or camera chore- ography naturally during filming, which gave us a strong foundation for the final VFX shots in post-production. Tell us about craing the film's environments and perfecting the coastline of Berk for the epic flight sequences. Christian Mänz: Early in pre-production, we scouted locations in Scotland, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland. Those helicopter flights gave us a real-life exhilarating experience that we wanted to try and replicate on film, with Hiccup flying on Toothless around the coast- line of Berk. And it was real-life reference that we looked at with Dean and [director of photography] Bill Pope to find out how we wanted to photograph these key scenes—everything from motorbike chases and FPV [first-person view] drone footage, to speed parascending and wingsuit GoPro footage. Films like Top Gun: Maverick were an in- spiration and aspiration because of the lengths that the filmmakers had gone to shoot as much as possible for real, but also because