
This week I had the chance to talk with Simon Otto, the Head of Character Animation on “How to Train Your Dragon.” He’s been an artist at DreamWorks for nearly 13 years and spent the past 3 1/2 years working on “Dragons”.
LCJ: What were your duties as Head of Character Animation on “How to Train Your Dragon”?
Simon: My job was split into two: the first half of my experience with the movie, which was basically the first two years on the film, I helped the designers develop the characters and brought their designs into the 3D world. And then we were able to create digital puppets that we were able to play with as characters in the movie. Then, maybe a year and a half ago, we took these puppets and started playing, scene by scene. I worked together with a team of about 50 animators and was the right hand of the director.
LCJ: How challenging was it to come up with the animated look for the Vikings and the dragons?
Simon: The difficult part was coming-up with dragons that looked and felt realistic, because dragons don’t exist. We had to find a way to make them look like real animals. So we came up with this game of mix and match, where we exchanged the body, the head and the legs on all of the dragons until we came-up with something we liked. Toothless, the main dragon, became a mix of an eagle and a panther. We went out and collected all this footage of real animals and studied them in great details. Then when it came time to animate the scenes we knew what we were drawing.
LCJ: The 3D of the movie is fantastic. My favorite scene in the movie is when Hiccup and Astrid are riding Toothless through the fog on their way to the dragon’s nest. You see them in the middle of the screen and then one at a time all of these other dragons start popping-up around them and becoming clearer, all in the same shot. It’s incredible 3D filmmaking.
Simon: Thank you very much. It was quite a challenge to get to animate so many dragons in the same shot. We really needed a lot of help on the computers to get so many different dragons all together. And we had to make sure that each of the dragons flies different, because they all have different body shape and wing span and we had to be sure that was reflected on the screen.
LCJ: It’s an amazing scene. Did you get to work with the voice actors – Jay Baruchel, America Ferrera – at all?
Simon: Yes. What we lead animators do is go to the recordings and sit in the corner. The actors sometimes don’t even know that we’re there. And we observe them and sketch them, especially the great actors, to see what gestures they’re doing over and over. They give us a tremendous amount of ideas of how we can perform certain scenes. In the case of Gerard Butler, who plays Stoick, he always had this great gesture with his right hand when he was doing a scene. And if you watch the movie you can see that gesture coming into play with the character all the time. We create these characters in computers, so our job is to make the audience think that these are characters are real people.
LCJ: You’ve worked on many of DreamWorks animated films, including “Bee Movie”, “Over the Hedge” and “Flushed Away”, is “Dragons” your favorite of them all?
Simon: I’d have to say yes. I grew-up watching the great Disney animated films such as “Jungle Book” and “The Aristocats” and making animated movie is what I wanted to do all of my life. And “How to Train Your Dragon”, to me, is the film that comes the closest to the classic Disney movies in terms of how the characters perform. They’re funny, but at the same time they look and act like real human beings. This movie allowed my to be very realistic with the humans and be very inventive with the dragons.
More with Simon coming-up.