BTS: How To Train Your Dragon

IBC

This remake of a classic animation works from Roger Deakins’ original lighting design, a colour palette plucked from the Faroe Islands and puppeteered dragons, explains DoP Bill Pope.

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All too often the live action remake of a classic animation falls flat but the makers of How To Train Your Dragon have miraculously retained the charm of the original in part by not straying too far from the template.

Take perhaps the original’s iconic image of sensitive teenage Viking Hiccup reaching out to touch the nose of a supposedly fearsome dragon called Toothless. Pope noticed that in the animated feature the scene was lit with a lavender sunset.

“That was a bold choice. It's easier done in animation than in reality but I decided I was going to do it anyway and I got so much kickback – ‘What are you talking about doing a lavender sunset?’ But sometimes the sunset is lavender so why not remind viewers of what was a lovely fragile colour it was for that scene.”

Director Dean DeBlois, who made all three previous animated features, returns for Universal’s live action reboot and invited Pope to shoot the film on the recommendation of Roger Deakins, the celebrated British DoP who had acted as visual consultant to the franchise. It was Deakins who had selected the lavender hue and Pope, who shot The Matrix and Baby Driver, had no hesitation in following “the master’s” cue.

“Roger shot those movies,” Pope says. “He just did it in a computer rather than with a camera. They have Roger’s signature touches such as ‘Roger’s yellow.’ He knew that the story is based on reality by which I mean we’re in the Viking world. So what colour light do you have? You have daylight, moonlight and firelight. Why mess with that. I wanted audiences to feel at home with the experience that they had in the animated movie, so I didn't alter anything.”

While respectful of Deakins’ work, Pope is underselling his responsibility in translating the story into a different medium. He attributes its success to the casting both of actors and the puppeteers who played the dragons on set.  Mason Thames who plays Hiccup was only 16 when filming began in January 2024.

“Mason is an incredible young actor and it became apparent to me, the camera department and everyone that this kid has such self-assurance and physical awareness of what he's doing all the time,” Pope says. “He’s like Buster Keaton. It turns out that he studied dance as well as acting. After meeting Mason, now I think all actors should take dance classes.”

He adds, “The second most important decision was hiring the guys who did the puppeteering for War Horse.”

They are members of Brighton-based puppeteering troupe Puppets With Guts who worked on the National Theatre production as well as films including Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

“Now you've got a kid who can really act playing against dragons who can act back and are completely inhabiting the space for real.”

Pope is no stranger to this process having shot the live action between nine year old Neel Sethi playing Mowgli and sets of Jim Henson Company puppeteers playing various animals for Jon Favreau’s Jungle Book (2016).

“Even if the animal was a sock puppet the puppeteers were so into the part that the kid’s imaginations was fired. It just made performances so strong. Mason's awareness of space and the ability to actually reach out and touch the dragon or move with the dragon makes such a difference. We have a stage with a large village, the Chief’s house and full-sized dragons. There’s no guessing with blue screen.”

While Framestore took charge of hundreds of VFX shots the production based itself at Titanic Studios in Belfast which is where Pope’s photography began to take shape. For instance, the training arena in the film was designed as a 360-degree practical set enabling unbroken camera movements and dynamic action sequences.

“Dean understood that when you bring an animation into the real world, the more real you are the more believable it will be. On top of which you can’t replicate half of the things in the original, like flying dragons into the sky and having them dive down. Dean and I talked for three months going back and forth until we realized that we couldn’t solve this in the abstract. We had to get into the physical space with stunt people, puppeteers and actors in order to figure it out what we could do. We pre-visualized a lot but even this was kind of rudimentary and only came into focus on set.”

He says that DeBlois wanted to shoot IMAX from the get-go in order to showcase the flying scenes but that the studio execs weren’t interested. “Two weeks out from production the figures came back from Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer which made hundreds of millions of dollars for screenings in IMAX. The studio turned around and said, ‘Hey, we got an idea., we want to do this in IMAX’ and I'm like, ‘But we start shooting in two weeks!’

“I’d shot all my tests and everything was prepped. Of course, we switched at the last minute but I didn't want to work off a crane or to be slowed down or have to do all the things that are required when shooting with a big heavy camera.”

He opted to shoot the action scenes with the IMAX approved ARRI LF and to retain his original camera choice of Alexa 35 with its old-fashioned film frame size using anamorphic lenses.

“Dean and I felt like the intimate scenes would be best in that size frame because you want to be seeing the actor's faces and not call attention to anything outside of that.”

Many scenes were designed to mirror the fluid, dynamic camera work of the animated films. By combining traditional dolly shots with advanced gimbals, Pope and his team created smooth transitions between grounded human interactions and sweeping dragon action, capturing both the intimate and the epic.

Inspiration for the rugged geography of Berk and colour scheme came from a recce in Iceland and the Faroe Islands. “That’s where dragons live, right? We fell in love with both places and flew many hours in helicopters finding locations.”

In fact, they couldn’t use most of the locations to shoot in because they couldn't get close enough to the cliffs. “I photographed from the helicopter but because hundreds of thousands of birds are flying all over the place you can’t get a helicopter close. Even if you took a drone in there it’s going to go down. So we decided to scan everything with Lidar and build it in a computer. It's photoreal. I saw side-by-side comparisons of the photography and the Lidar and couldn’t tell which was which.”

The action scenes of flying dragons was shot on a blue screen stage with the Lidar scans applied as backgrounds.

“The colour palette of the movie is the palette of the Faroes. There's a red layer of iron oxide that runs throughout those cliffs. There are various shades of brown and then this streak of red in the rock, the ocean is turquoise, and the skies are lead grey. Even the buildings in the Faroes reflect that. They're painted the green of the grass and the turquoise of the sea. They’re painted the red of the rock. You can see that native Faroese build on what they see so we decided to do the same thing.

“I came back with handful rocks, each one of them a different colour, and gave them to the production. This is the Faroes in your hand. Everything was painted with those colours so we ground the story in that world. It was really one of the most worthwhile scouts I’ve ever been on.”

Pope continues, “That's what filmmaking is. It's collaborative. If you want a palette, you all have to agree on what that palette is. If you want a feeling, you have to all agree on what it is because it's not my choice or the director’s or the VFX people or animators. Everybody has to feel the inspiration and understand the direction. Filmmaking is a journey. I get this one section of the trip. The editor gets another section. Visual effects another and so on. If the film is going to work you have to do this as a team.”

Pope has made successive movies with new techniques and new technology from helping shoot bullet time in The Matrix to Jungle Book by way of puppet animation Team America: World Police to VFX heavy Marvel productions like Spider-Man 2 and the live action CG blend of Alita: Battle Angel. He says he is not necessarily drawn to this type of production although acknowledges that by reputation he gets more offers for work that carry a tech element.

“I started out in this business doing music videos for 10 years (for Peter Gabriel, Metallica, Chris Isaac, Motley Crue among others) and each of those have an element of trickery. Today are we shooting the promo backwards or at six frames a second or whatever the visual gag is for the video so that by the time I got to my first movie Darkman [directed by Sam Raimi in 1990] which is a VFX movie I just knew what to do. I’m not afraid of new technology. It’s just an arrow in the quiver.”

So what does Pope think of AI in terms of a threat or an aid to cinematography?

“We might struggle to keep it as a tool but the human brain has to be in charge. I've not seen any AI that touches real filmmaking, nothing that crosses the Uncanny Valley at least not yet. You’ve got to be wary of it, but I’m not afraid of it.”

Dragon design

Framestore’s dragon design was based on specific animal behaviours. Toothless’ movements for example are inspired by the agility of salamanders and the grace of black panthers. The Gronckle is a combination of the flight patterns of bumblebees with the stocky movements of bulldogs, bullfrogs and hippos. The Deadly Nadder features precise, bird-like movements inspired by parrots and emus.

While the dragons’ fire was digitally generated the SFX team provided real pyrotechnic bursts on set to create interactive lighting, heat and impact points. These practical effects gave actors and stunt performers something tangible to react to.

Inspired by technology used in the Fast & Furious films, the SFX team created dynamic hydraulic rigs to simulate dragon flight and allowed the actors to experience realistic motion.

Also, a 70-foot Viking ship was placed on a 12-ton hydraulic platform to replicate the swaying and rocking of ocean waves for maritime scenes.

The Viking village set itself featured working gas systems to power torches and flames, and dragon arena doors were also fully mechanized, allowing them to open and close dynamically during action sequences.

Dragon puppetry

Full-scale foam heads were built for each dragon species based on digital sculpts created by the VFX team, giving actors tangible points of interaction during filming.

For Toothless, the team constructed multiple heads, each designed for specific actions in the story. These included a puppeteered ‘hero’ head to allow the puppeteer to create a realistic dragon performance for the actors to interact with, and a ‘wrestle’ head for the more explosive action sequences.

Bringing Toothless to life required a team of five puppeteers. His long tail was so extensive that it required three puppeteers to operate it, in addition to one controlling the head and another managing the torso.

The actors even took an animal interaction training course at a horse farm to familiarise themselves with handling large creatures. In addition, they participated in puppetry workshops, introducing them to the different dragons and their distinct characteristics all in a bid to ensure authentic interactions.

While the production did not use traditional animatronics, the Toothless puppet featured cable-controlled moving jaw and ‘ear plates.’ The team also designed a series of interchangeable eye inserts that allowed for modifications to Toothless’s eye shape allowed him to convey a range of emotions from anger and curiosity to playfulness.