'How To Train Your Dragon' VFX supervisor on bringing Toothless to life

For his work on summer blockbuster How To Train Your Dragon, Dreamworks’ live-action adaptation of their 2010 animation, Oscar-nominated VFX supervisor Christian Manz had a clear directive. “To honour what’s gone before, but try to make it feel real.”

Manz, who has also worked on the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts franchises, referenced the original films and, crucially, “follow Dean DeBlois”, who directed the animated film and its sequel as well as the live-action version. Manz began working on production in October 2022 alongside DeBlois and production designer Dominic Watkins, and all had one clear vision in mind. “It had to look real. Dragons have to look real.”

To achieve that goal, the team had what Manz called a “nonlinear design process”, which involved painting concepts, sculpting, animating, re-sculpting, redrawing and animating again – and not necessarily in that order.

A puppet team lead by Tom Wilton, famed for his work on War Horse, made three-dimensional puppets so the actors would have something to work with on set. “They weren't photo finished,” Manz explained. “With Toothless, Tom could operate his ear petals, mouth, and eyes.

“Unless you have that connectivity, [with a puppet on set] those shots don't work,” he adds. “I've worked on a few things where actors don't want to do all that. ‘I'll just mime it’. But you can always tell. Even though the creature might be beautifully rendered and finished, you can tell it it's not there because an actor is not interacting with it.” 

While some of the dragon puppets were just heads on big rigs, flying sequences involved full-size models. “We had an animatronic buck for each dragon that had a head, neck, and body that we could move to match our animation cycle,” Manz explained. “Usually, that stuff is very controlled, but we were able to live puppeteer and dial in different flight cycles.” 

“[Traditionally], if a director wants to make a change on the day to a shot, it would be a problem,” continues Manz. “I knew that we didn’t have time to do that, because of our shoot schedule, and there was so much dialogue and acting that the scene couldn’t be constrained by what we were doing [with VFX].”

Having the animatronic dragons, however, gave director DeBlois a degree of flexibility. “If we saw Mason [Thames, who plays protagonist Hiccup] was doing something, we could operate the puppet to respond. Or we could surprise him and make him feel like something happened he wasn’t expecting.” 

Ultimately, however, Manz’s job was to remove all that puppet work. “There’s all this stuff going on, but ultimately I'm just looking at the human being because that's all we want out of the shot,” he says.  

World building

Manz’s remit on How To Train Your Dragons extended beyond the eponymous creatures into the world in which they inhabit. “In years gone by, I've done plenty of stuff where we filmed plates and then you stick your flying creature in,” he says. “In those cases, we were constrained by what the helicopter or plane was doing. I knew from the beginning [on How To Train Your Dragon] that we were going to do computer generated backgrounds because then we can follow the flying.”  

With the help of production service provider Truenorth, the production filmed across a variety of locations in Faroe Islands, Scotland and Iceland. Manz’s team “used all of that material to come up with something that, hopefully once it's all glued together, works to make you believe that you are physically in that world.” 

That took a great deal of collaboration. “We work with every single department and it's not like you're trying to do their job, but you're trying to almost become little part of their department,” Manz says. “You want to make sure you’re not letting them down. Whether that's making sure we're capturing all the costumes properly or making sure we're doing a stunt correctly.” 

Start to finish 

Framestore provided a 'beginning to end' creative offer on How To Train Your Dragon, taking on all the VFX work for the film. This meant working across its offices in Melbourne, London, and Montreal, each on a different part of the film, which made the project more efficient. “For asset sharing, usually you [spend time] trying to get those assets off another company but we didn’t have to do any of that,” Manz observes.

“When you have to share an asset object and one company can't quite make it look like the other company's... We could just pull a shot up and work out what they would they were doing, rather than it be guesswork. We didn't have that worry.”  

This offering isn’t just efficient, but cost saving too. “Even now, I'm always surprised when I see a streaming show and there's like 10 different companies on there. I think sometimes whilst you need to get stuff done quickly, sometimes there's efficiencies lost, and costs multiplied, by splitting it up like that.” 

Even with everything in house, Manz says it’s always a bit of a gamble. “That’s the whole of visual effects. You’ve got to hope it comes out okay in the end. And it did here.”