Behind the on-set puppetry in ‘How to Train Your Dragon’. An excerpt from issue #39 of befores & afters magazine.
Representing Toothless and the other dragons on the set of How to Train Your Dragon and having them interact with the actors was something that could have been achieved in several ways, such as via full dragon animatronics, stuffies, tennis balls on a stick, ropes or laser pointers. While some of these stand-in methods were utilized, both visual effects supervisor Christian Manz and animation supervisor Glen McIntosh had previously had favourable experiences with engaging puppeteers to act out creatures on set with puppets.
“Glen had had experience on the Jurassic World films with backpack rigs and the dinosaur heads and bodies and tails being part of the rig,” advises Manz. “Then I’d had amazing puppeteers for Fantastic Beasts. Creature puppetry supervisor Tom Wilton had been part of both those productions in terms of puppeteering. He’d also worked with Paul Vincett and Becky Johnson from Stitches and Glue on a whole bunch of films, where they built great puppets which were manoeuvrable and light. So that’s the route we went, with Stitches and Glue directly using our digital models to build the puppets.”
“In the end,” says Manz, “it just became so crucial to have [Tom and the other puppeteers there. As a visual effects supervisor, you are often there on set going, ‘Remember the creature. It’s going to be there. OK, now it’s here.’ I mean, sometimes the dragons might even be off-camera, but having an eyeline was still so important for the actors.”
As creature puppetry supervisor, Wilton wore two hats on the production. He was both the head of department for puppetry as well as the lead puppeteer for Toothless. This made for some intense moments during filming. “For puppetry takes with Mason and Toothless,” recounts Wilton, “I’d be there trying to be in the moment as Toothless and give Mason everything that he needs. Then they shout ‘cut’, and I’d be getting my mobile phone out to text the transport coordinator to deal with something on second unit for the next day. Then I’d be back as Toothless. It was a lot.”
Some of the first conversations between Wilton, Manz and McIntosh centered on the kinds of puppet rigs that would need to be built for the different dragons. “Glen and I had the same idea about one of the ways to represent the dragons on set, which came from the very successful, yet very simple puppetry reference rig that was used on Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom to represent the Indoraptor,” outlines Wilton. “It was a two person rig made up of an independent backpack for each person that allowed for height and a floating inflatable head that would have rod points and controls off it. Then there was a similar tail section that allowed the two puppeteers to effectively mark out the footprint of the creature on set, but also due to it being really lightweight, there were also dynamic performance beats involved.”
‘How to Train Your Dragon’ – the new issue of the magazine is out!
This time, a particular kind of backpack rig was made with lightweight foam heads by Stitches and Glue, rather than inflatable heads. Other sections of the dragons were also made. “With Toothless,” explains McIntosh, “we built the head, the whole body, the tail and the legs. Tom and his entire team were able to pose the creature. It was invaluable because it not only informed the actors how big Toothless is as a creature, but it also informed the camera team in terms of composition and framing.”
The foam heads were also ones that could be puppeteered on their own. For Toothless, however, Wilton felt things could go slightly further than just a foam head. “With Christian, we decided that the two key emotional signifiers that we would have on the puppet head were a mouth that could be operated, and then ears. The mouth would let us puppeteer eating fish and other things, and deal with growling and showing anger. Then we had the ear plates on the back of Toothless’ foam head, which were also a great moving emotional signifier. We had had ears on the puppet horses in the stage show War Horse. The audience there would often come away thinking that there was an awful lot more going on that puppet head, and that I think was from the ears. For Toothless, we could offer surprise, intrigue, fear and anger with those ear plates.”
The operation of the Toothless puppet’s eyes were further early considerations. The build commenced with a fixed eye, rather than a movable eye mechanism, but Wilton soon realized something was amiss. “When we got into the rehearsal process and we started to do some test footage with Toothless, what we realized was that the fixed eye shape made our puppet look a bit startled. I started to get concerned that it might go against what we were trying to do with our actors in terms of telling key story beats. I was also worried that we would just have one note on camera for Toothless. He would just be surprised all the time.”
At that point, Wilton came up with a solution, inspired by stop-motion animation. “I thought, in stop-motion they change out the eyes or mouths for replacement animation, so maybe we could do this with eyes. I had a conversation with Stitches and Glue, and they worked out a way of running out different eye shapes and eyelid shapes for Toothless. And so, the night before each Toothless scene, we would work out, what is the general feeling of Toothless here? Is he scared, or aggressive, or playful? And then we would put that eye shape into the eyes for that scene.”
For one particular moment—when Hiccup meets Toothless for the first time—a special pair of puppet eyes were made that had added depth. “Stitches and Glue made them to have a resin shield going over a 3D printed green eye shape that would give depth to the eye,” describes Wilton. “We discovered that it was relatively simple to be able to adjust where that eye was looking, so we were able to retro on just one of the heads and essentially puppeteer the eye for that key scene where Toothless is lying down and he’s looking back up at Hiccup. For that scene, I could reach my hand in and puppeteer Toothless’ eye to allow it to look back.”
In general, on set, Wilton held the Toothless head by holding a handle on the bottom that allowed him to operate the mouth. His other hand could then reach inside the head and operate two triggers for the ear plates. Built into the head by Stitches and Glue was what is called a ‘flimsy’, a piece of a flexible but durable tube that connected to a rig that could go run down Wilton’s shoulder and attach to his leg—the idea here was to reduce the weight he had to bear while on set for long periods.
Prior to the shoot, a workshop was devised by Wilton and his assistant creature puppetry supervisor Sarah Mardel for Mason and Nico Parker, who plays Astrid, to introduce them to working with puppets. “At that stage,” says Wilton, “we didn’t have the hero Toothless puppet head ready. But we did manage to get the Richard Parker tiger puppet from the Life of Pi theater show present for that workshop. We did lots of drama games of them interacting with this tiger. The idea was to show them that, if they believe that this thing is real, then that is one of the most crucial elements to the audience, believing that this thing is real. We call that the concept of the fourth puppeteer, since there were three puppeteers for each War Horse puppet; it’s the actor who becomes the fourth puppeteer.”
“The touch becomes so important,” continues Wilton. “You can grab or hit a puppet. Then, weight with a puppet is really important. While we’re using a lightweight foam head, we’re also trying to say, actually this is a big, heavy creature. And so, if that initial touch comes in clumsily, it can read on camera as if it is only a puppet. This is also crucial down the line in VFX because they want to sell that interaction. In the end, that workshop was a really good starting point.”
“What we were trying to do was get them used to the idea of being close to a giant animal,” discusses McIntosh, in terms of those rehearsals. “A Bengal tiger, i.e. the Life of Pi puppet, weighs 500 pounds. Toothless is a much bigger animal, of course, but he’s kind of like a tiger. He’s a beautiful animal, but he can also be terrifying. Tom and his team would be doing impromptu things like turning the head a little quicker, seeing how that would make Mason and Nico react. Later, on set, little moments like that were also invaluable to the animation team.”
During the actual shoot, Wilton heavily referenced Framestore’s animation vignettes and the original animated film. “The night before each scene, I would sit down and I would watch the scene from the animated film. I knew it would give me a really, really clear direction for what Dean would want on the day for Toothless. The Framestore vignettes let me go even more in depth, in terms of camera angles and working out how many puppeteers we would need and, actually, how to hide them. I spent an awful lot of time thinking about how I could reduce my footprint on set for me and for the rest of the puppeteer team.”
Wilton even developed a sound vocabulary for Toothless to deliver during the on-set performance. “I went through the entire animated film and I made note of all of the different sounds that Toothless would make. Then I went away and I began to try and develop my own palette, mimicking these sounds and creating words of my own as well. The idea was to give us a really clear direction of what Toothless was feeling in those moments.”
A few key Toothless moments became some of Wilton’s most memorable ones on the film. For example, when Hiccup first enters the cove, we see Toothless appearing on top of a rock, which he then climbs down and jumps off towards Hiccup. “I thought, for that scene, we probably needed to do a puppetry handover, almost like a Texas Switch. We had one of our puppeteers positioned for an eyeline on the rock so that Mason’s eyes were going to the right place. Then for the second position that Toothless is in, there’s a takeover and then I came around the rock with the puppet head and stalked towards him to push him back.
Later, the drawing in the sand and dance moment between Toothless and Hiccup became another powerful one for Wilton. “It was a wonderful and delicate mix of acting and technical creation. We had Karsten Jacobsen on Steadicam and he was dancing around me and I was dancing around Mason. Then, crucially, we’ve got that moment of Hiccup and Toothless coming together and that initial touch between them. From a performance side of things, that was the one that really stood out.”
McIntosh’s most memorable puppeteering scene related to the capture of Toothless in the Dragon Training Arena after the Night Fury has rescued Hiccup from the Monstrous Nightmare. “That involved 30-plus stunt performers getting pulled and ratcheted and thrown. Instead of just grabbing nothing or grabbing air, we actually had geometry that they could rush onto and touch. And there was Tom underneath all of them operating this foam head. Poor Tom, they jumped on top of him for, I don’t know how many takes, but we had special stunt foam heads that could take a little bit more of a beating. In the end, that was a lot of fun because we could get some really complex choreography. It would be CG in the end, but it really felt like the stunt people were tackling it.”
Of course, Toothless was not the only dragon for which puppets stood in for the creature. Backpack rigs were utilized for the Gronckle, the Hideous Zippleback and the Deadly Nadder, each having foam heads made for individual puppeteering. One key scene with the Gronckle required it to grab a hold of Gobber’s (Nick Frost) prosthetic arm, requiring the actor to put his fist into the puppet’s mouth. “So,” says Wilton, “we knew we had to have an open mouth that Nick could interact with. The Gronckle head also featured patterned holes in the head. Becky from Stitches and Glue came up with that to allow the wind to travel through the head, and the rain to fall through as well, which would have added a lot of weight to it. People thought it was a suggestion of the scales, that pattern, but it was just to make it easier to puppeteer!”
‘How to Train Your Dragon’ – the new issue of the magazine is out!
Another of the dragon puppets related to the Monstrous Nightmare. “You realize a Monstrous Nightmare’s head is as big as a T-Rex head!” informs McIntosh. “These are gigantic animals. It was much more helpful than just having a cardboard cutout or a ball on a stick—it helped inform the actors about how they approached the creatures, how they treated them. You just move differently around a larger animal, which in turn was invaluable to the animation process.”
On a much smaller scale was the Terrible Terror, a tiny dragon with a big impact. “In our Terrible Terror kit,” details Wilton, “we had a larger version for close-ups, and a slightly smaller one. Then we had a stuffy, which couldn’t really be puppeteered but could be held by an actor. An additional kind was just a very simple beanbag version of the body that could also be held. We used a lot of different methods throughout the puppeteering.” b&a
