Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1540269
tion in the film. On set we used a Framestore proprietary tool called Farsight Go, which is an AR [augmented reality] iPad app driven by Unreal En- gine. I had used it to great success on the last Fantastic Beasts film to visualize the extensive digital set extensions. This time we used it to represent the dragons for Dean, the other key filmmakers, and the actors. All of the animation studies that the team had done in pre-pro- duction were ingested into the soware. We could then load that animation and see it in the set via the iPad camera, which we could also match to the film lens we were shooting with. It became an in- valuable tool to line up the puppets, check actor eye lines, and frame shots. "The potential complexity of the VFX work was much higher here, due to the sheer amount of interaction between the human and dragon cast..." When shooting the action of Toothless fighting the Monstrous Nightmare in the training arena, second unit director Patrick Loung- way used Farsight Go to record a camera move, and then referenced playback of that when shooting the plates. It reduced some of the usual guesswork when filming this kind of material and definitely made the final shots even better. Tell us about setting up your workflow for such a large-scale project. How did you organize your team, share assets, and communicate throughout the process? Christian Mänz: As the production VFX supervisor working along- side Glen and VFX producer Chris Raimo, our office and on-set team varied in size from about 15 of us during filming to eight in post-pro- duction, plus seven in-house comp artists. Framestore, however, had around 1,200 people working on the film and on the production across sites in London, Montreal, Mel- bourne, and Mumbai—as well as the large FPS team who did all of our previs and postvis. We split the VFX shot and asset work between three of these Framestore sites in London, Montreal, and Melbourne, treating them as three separate vendors with their own supervision and produc- tion. Mumbai supported all three of these, but we did not deal with them directly on the production side. Framestore's London team, led by VFX supervisor Andy Kind, han- dled all of the Toothless acting scenes—such as his first meeting with Hiccup—alongside the iconic flying sequences and Toothless' battle with the Monstrous Nightmare in the training arena. They were also 8 cgw j u ly • a u g u s t • s e p t e m b e r 2 0 2 5