THE LIGHTING INFLUENCE OF ROGER DEAKINS
AT first glance “How to Train Your Dragon,” the new action-adventure film from DreamWorks Animation based on the whimsical children’s book by Cressida Cowell, does not seem to share much with the Coen brothers’ “No Country for Elderly Men” or M. Night Shyamalan’s “Village.” But a closer look reveals some similarities. From washed-out landscapes to minimally lighted rooms, the Nordic locations in “Dragon” feel more lived in & rough edged — more realistic — than two typically finds in animation. This comes from the influence of an outsider, the Oscar-nominated cinematographer Roger Deakins. Best known for his work on “A Pretty Mind,” “The Shawshank Redemption” & Coen brothers’ films, Mr. Deakins had small experience working in animation, save for some consulting on “Wall-E.” But as the co-directors of “Dragon,” Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders (“Lilo & Stitch”), were thinking of a way to distinguish their film from other animated work, they decided to bring in someone who could see light in a different way. Below Mr. Deakins, Mr. DeBlois & Mr. Sanders discuss how they achieved the film’s look.
Hiccup, the boy hero of “How to Train Your Dragon,” lacks fighting prowess & an enthusiasm to slay dragons, making him out of step with his clan of Vikings. They often retreats to his studio to work on his inventions. In a studio scene, light is used sparingly, with the corners of the frame fading in to black, similar to Mr. Deakins’s work in “The Village,” set in 19th-century rural Pennsylvania. “There’s such a temptation to see everything, in animation,” Mr. Deakins said. “And I think part of my influence was to go away from that & say you don’t always must see everything. If the film has two element in it, it’s a lot of darkness. & in the same way, there's a lot of bright areas. It’s sort of pushing the extremes as probably I would do in live action.”
THE GENESIS OF TOOTHLESS
A set of progression images shows the various stages in generating the look of Toothless, the seemingly mythical dragon that terrorizes the movie’s band of Vikings. “If you’re trying to generate, for instance, a soft day exterior in an animated world, it’s hard to do,” Mr. Deakins said. “And a quantity of those things were the hardest things to discuss. They had to figure out how to change the application in the process of lighting to generate soft effects” (like the subtle way light bounces off Toothless’s skin in the last of the progression images). The actual design of Toothless fell to Mr. DeBlois & Mr. Sanders. “We wanted him to be a small more mammalian than the other dragons, which are generally more reptilian in their vibe, because they knew that this dragon was going to must have a definite warmth,” Mr. Sanders said.
MINING PAST WORK
As they plotted the movie’s lighting design, the co-directors & Mr. Deakins assembled a collage of images for each of the script’s scenes. “A lot of the stills that they pulled for reference were stills from Roger’s past films, specifically scenes from ‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,’” Mr. DeBlois said. “There were a lot of similar moods in that imagery to what they wanted to convey.” The directors were taken with the way that Mr. Deakins evoked a sense of place & feeling in that film with natural light. “You can taste the scene as much as you can see it & listen to it,” Mr. Sanders added. The filmmakers sought to capture that in two particular scene, an encounter between four small dragons.
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