Having already found a legion of fans as an animated trilogy, a live-action version of How to Train Your Dragon was released in cinemas earlier this summer.
The film is a mixture of live actors and visual effects, created by the team at Framestore.
Production VFX supervisor Christian Mänz talks to TVBEurope about the work that went into creating the dragons both on-set and off.
How did Framestore get involved with the film?
I first met with [writer and director] Dean DeBlois in October 2022. Peter Cramer, President of Universal Pictures, had talked to him about making a live-action version of How to Train Your Dragon but wasn’t convinced that Toothless would work in the real world.
For three months I worked with Framestore’s global director of animation, Michael Eames, and the Framestore Visual Development team, led by Owen Jackson, to create imagery to try and prove them wrong.
Working in Photoshop, ZBrush and Blender, the Vis Dev team were able to explore multiple options in terms of sculpt and surfacing without being bogged down by the intricacies of the full VFX asset pipeline. We were always referencing real world animals—snakes, lizards, salamanders, black panthers, etc as well as playing with his overall proportions, eye size and thickness of scales. Even at this early stage, anatomy, from the skeleton outwards was really important to deliver a believable animal.
The result of this test phase was a Toothless who was much bigger than in the original films, with a proportionally smaller head and longer neck. His bat like wings were also much larger. We were able to present to the studio a turntable, photographic stills, and, to Dean’s surprise, an animation test which Michael had been working on which really impressed everyone. Now green lit, work on the movie proper could begin.
What was your role, and how big was the team that worked on the project?
I was the production VFX supervisor working alongside animation supervisor Glen McIntosh 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 production, but Framestore had around 1200 people working on the film and on the production we used seven in house comp artists.
Please explain your role and what that meant on this project.
On a film like How to Train Your Dragon, I’m on from the very start with the director and producers and am there until the very end when we are doing technical QC screenings before release.
As production VFX supervisor, I am creatively responsible for delivering all of the VFX for the movie, working with the Supervision teams at VFX facilities to brief, and review the work, before presenting to the director and other filmmakers.
The dragons are obviously central to the storytelling, as well as the world of Berk itself. In pre-production, I led a team of Concept, Visual Development, Animation and Previs artists to help director Dean DeBlois conceive the world of the film and to work out how we’d going to go about shooting it with the other heads of department.
During filming, I’m on set every day, advising Dean and others on all of the VFX aspects of the shoot – be it the dragons, or the background environment or some other spot effect. I also had our animation supervisor, Glen McIntosh working alongside me to help curate the Dragon performance. On top of the shoot day, I’ll also have to review the latest work from Framestore to present to Dean for comment.
In post production my team and I are based at the cutting rooms – we’ll be doing daily reviews with Framestore and then with Dean, from early animation blocking through to the final shots. The job then is to make sure that the work is telling the right story and that it’s all hitting the right and consistent quality level.
In total, I was on the film for 2 1/2 years, since the beginning of that first Toothless test work.
What technology did you use and how did you use it?
On a film like How to Train Your Dragon, the various teams who make up the VFX department use different pieces of technology in their day jobs.
Personally, I couldn’t survive without my MacBook Pro, a couple of decent monitors, Photoshop, Premiere, Keynote, Excel and an app called Screen which I use for creating playlists and reviewing work.
Our VFX production team, led by production manager Sam Girdler, used a bespoke FileMaker database which, as well as tracking shot notes and statuses, also automated a lot of tasks, such as packaging up the multitude of set data for Framestore and shots to DI.
Our on-set data wrangler team used Blackmagic Pocket Cinema cameras as well as GoPros for Witness cameras – recording every set up to aid camera tracking – alongside SLRs to take HDRI photos and other devices to measure camera data. We were also using the Framestore FarSight Go App on iPads to visualise the dragons on set.
All of the sets were 3D scanned via LiDAR by Clear Angle Studios with textures captured on SLR and Roundshot cameras. We also used their full body photogrammetry rig to scan all of the cast in their multiple costume variants, as well as their Dorothy Head Scanning Rig to capture the high resolution data required by Framestore to create digital doubles for the flying scenes. In pre production, Dominic Ridley from Clear Angle was with us in a helicopter when we filmed in the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Scotland. He shot thousands of photographs with an SLR to create photogrammetry scans of multiple locations which Framestore used to build the extensive environments for the aerial scenes, using the footage we shot on the Alexa LF as reference.
Framestore, of course, were using multiple pieces of software and hardware to create the nearly 1500 shots they finished on the film. The main bits of software include Maya, Nuke and Houdini but they also used plugins and proprietary applications including Freak, Framestore’s custom path tracer which it uses to render all of its images – being an IMAX film a lot of sequences were delivered at just over 4K at a 1:1.90 aspect ratio.
Live action adaptations of animated films are still relatively new. How did you deal with adding CGI characters to the real world?
Creating believable CG characters that stand shoulder to shoulder with actors in live action cinema is somewhat Framestore’s bread and butter. Having spent eight years as production VFX supervisor of the Fantastic Beasts films, I wanted to bring as much of that experience as possible to the table when embarking on this incredibly ambitious film.
Real world reference is key to the success of any creature work, and so it was with each of the dragons that we took from Concept though to the final shots. For the Monstrous Nightmare we looked at crocodiles for example for the way the teeth interlock as well as the nictitating membrane in the eyes. Toothless’ performance was based on big and domesticated cats as well as dogs, it’s this familiar behaviour that connects with the audience, and though fantastical in concept, makes them more credible as real, living and breathing animals. Skin textures and surfacing are created in a similar way. Once lit, using the on set data as reference, the dragons should look like they were shot for real, alongside the actors.
How were you able to help the real-life characters interact with the CGI characters?
I have worked with Tom Wilton and his puppeteering team since Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them in 2015. Alongside Stitches and Glue, who created the puppets for the third of those films, we felt like we had a great opportunity for us all to build on all that we had learnt on that franchise.
It doesn’t matter how good the animation or final render and comp is, if the interaction isn’t there on set, the final shot just won’t work. The live performance Tom, Sarah Mardel and the team delivered on set every day, with the various puppet props blew the whole crew away and gave the animation team at Framestore a strong foundation for the performances they would need to deliver.
We had a puppet for the whole of Toothless, minus his wings, based on the digital sculpt Framestore had created. This could be separated into sections depending on what the shot required – often it would be just Tom and the head, which had a moveable mouth and ear plates as well as poseable eyes. This meant he could give a performance for Mason Thames, as Hiccup, to play off of. All of the other dragons were represented by heads which were either hand held or mounted on back rigs, to mimic the long necks of the Zipplebacks for example.
There was a large amount of clean-up required in post, aided by the clean plates shot at the end of every set up, but that extra work was far outweighed by the authentic connection between human and dragon that the puppeteers created for us.
Were you able to draw inspiration from the animated films?
The original film was a huge source of inspiration, as well as working with the writer/director who had led all three films of the animated franchise. The Forbidden Friendship scene, where Hiccup bonds with Toothless was always going to be filmed pretty much shot for shot. As a beloved sequence from the original, Dean knew that the fan base and audience would not be happy if we did anything else.
For all of the other VFX-heavy scenes, including the multiple Toothless fights, we created detailed previs with FPS (Framestore Pre-production Services), led by supervisor Jon Allen alongside animation studies of all the dragons led by animation supervisor Kayn Garcia.
The animated movie sequences were the base of our blocking, but then we worked with Dean to elevate each scene through both dragon performance and cinematography. We were really striving to make something special and that could stand on its own merits as a live-action interpretation of a great story.
You used virtual reality to help director Dean DeBlois visualise the dragons on set. Tell us about that process.
We used a Framestore tool called Farsight Go, which is an AR iPad app driven by Unreal Engine. I’d used it successfully on the last Fantastic Beasts film, to visualise the digital set extensions, but here we needed to represent the dragons for Dean, Bill Pope, our director of photography, camera operator Karsten Jacobsen and the actors.
All of the animation studies that Kayn Garcia and team had done in pre production were ingested into Farsight. We could then load that animation and see it in the set via the iPad camera – which we could also match the film lens we were shooting with.
Senior virtual production technical director Rob Taheij, from the FPS team, was with us on both units as Farsight Go became an invaluable tool to line up the puppets, check eye lines and frame shots.
To capture the action of Toothless fighting the Monstrous Nightmare in the training arena, second unit director Patrick Loungeway was able to record a camera move, following the action with Farsight, and then reference playback of that, when shooting the plates.
By bringing some of what you’d usually have to wait until post production to see, live onto set, Farsight Go took away a lot of the usual guesswork when shooting CG creatures, resulting in better final shots.
What were the biggest challenges you faced?
Beyond the creation of Toothless and the other dragons, the biggest challenge was undoubtedly how to realise the flying scenes in a credible way.
We were already working on the animation and previs but the most important element was, of course, the actors and how we could make them look believably connected to their dragon steeds.
On previous shows which involved actors riding a creature, the shoot methodology involved motion controlled camera moves which needed techvis and prep, as well as the ride rig itself being programmed with actors having to hit very specific timings and marks to match pre-baked animation and camera choreography for every shot. I wanted our shoot not to be so bogged down with VFX restrictions.
Our solution was bespoke articulated bucks on top of six-axis gimbals for each of our key dragons. The overall body motion came from the gimbal, whilst the buck was separated into a head, neck and shoulders, whose movement matched the animated flight cycles created by Framestore. The design of these involved a lot of back and forth between Framestore and the SFX team, sharing the accurate body shapes, joint lengths, mechanical limits etc. Once built, each rig was put through its paces in testing pre shoot.
François Lambert, the VFX supervisor leading Framestore’s Montreal team, was our person on the ground feeding back issues to the FPS and VFX teams at Framestore as they arose. The innovation with the dragon gimbals was the ability to not only play back a flight cycle accurately, but also blend between different ones, live on set. The gimbal and buck motion could be separated, and driven by different cycles or, most usefully, be puppeteered manually via a Waldo control system. This meant that when shooting, we could rehearse with a selected cycle and then tweak the action by either changing the cycle or its speed, or most importantly work off what the actors were doing—if Mason pulled at Toothless’s 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 choreography naturally during filming, and we could build those as we worked on finishing the shots in post.
And what was the biggest achievement?
Though we made a lot of changes to Toothless in terms of look and animation, the audience has really fallen in love with him again. That is one of the biggest achievements.
Another was the flying sequences. To sit in the audience and the world premiere in LA, and hear the theatre erupt in applause and cheering at the end of the ‘test drive’ was a very satisfying moment indeed.
But, overall, we’re all incredibly proud of the VFX work, which delivers on the original brief of creating an immersive, visceral world, inhabited by living and breathing dragons, which enhance the already emotive storytelling.
