How to Be Disappointed with The Lack of Bonus Material

I’m going to format this post a little differently today. Instead of paragraphs upon paragraphs of me prattling on, here is a list of some fun facts about the animation of How to Train Your Dragon! (1, 2, and 3!) I spent some time watching the bonus materials (behind the scenes etc) and commentaries for the three films, only...How to Train Your Dragon 2 has a disturbing lack of bonus content and no commentary by anyone whatsoever. At least, not on the disc I own. But I don’t suppose the average movie watcher honestly cares if a commentary is included on a disc. 

So without further delay, here we go!

• ·       Every kind of complex animated element that exists in the movie happens within the very first scene of HTTYD. Fire, smoke, the ocean, every main and secondary character is introduced, there’s flying and catapults…
• ·       There were 4,000 controls for rigging the dragons, half of which were in the face.
• ·       Even the beards had to be rigged, and it took months just for Stoick’s beard.
• ·       The animators had to learn the physics of flight. They went to flight school and studied the anatomy of birds and bats, and received actual diplomas.
• ·       Each of the dragons was designed (appearance and movement) with inspiration from creatures in reality. In regards to flight, Gronckles have the ability to hover while flapping their wings at insane speeds like a humming bird, whereas Toothless’ flight movements are more like a sparrows.
• ·       DreamWorks created a brand new animation software from the ground up and HTTYD 2 was the first film made with this software. It changed how animators interact with it, and how they interact with the models, now being able to use pressure sensitive screens and pen tips to pose characters almost like they would in the physical world instead of clicking around with a mouse or typing in data and numbers. This helped bring more nuance into the animation, especially where facial expressions and emotions are concerned.
• ·       If the entire film was rendered on just one computer, it would finish rendering 10,273 years later!
• ·       There is a long shot in the opening of The Hidden World, that is the longest animated sequence without any camera cuts done to date (at least by DreamWorks). It took 7 seven animators to put it all together for this shot. Some of the animators even had to stop working on different films to work on this one shot.
• ·       The Hidden World has an alternate opening, although don’t ask me how that’s different than a regular deleted scene.
• ·       Richard Deacons was the cinematographer for all 3 films, and his influence is what resulted in the franchise having such gorgeous natural lighting which you don’t often see in animated films.
• ·       A new back-end renderer called MoonRay significantly improved render time for amazing details like bounced light affecting the color of their skin, bugs and moving ferns in a forest background etc. It has a sophisticated light ray tracker, so it tracks millions of light rays right from their source as they bounce off of surfaces repeatedly.
• ·       And one final fun fact unrelated to animation, I share a birthday with Hiccup! February 29!

"It's the job that's never started as takes longest to finish." J. R. R. Tolkien