How to Train Your Dragon

Today on Art of the Cut we speak with Wyatt Smith, ACE about editing Universal’s live action version of How To Train Your Dragon.

Wyatt’s been on Art of the Cut before for Mary Poppins Returns. He was also on to discuss Doctor Strange.

Wyatt’s other work includes editing the live action version of The Little Mermaid, Into the Woods, - for which he was nominated for an ACE Eddie - Harriet, and Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides. And he was nominated for an Emmy for Tony Bennett: An American Classic.

I just watched How to Train Your Dragon, and I loved it.

Thank you. It was an absolute pleasure to work on. The response has been amazing. I think we’re over 500 million worldwide box office, which is great for the movie business everywhere.

I’m assuming you watched the original animated movie. Did you read the book?

I did watch the original animated film when it came out in 2010, and I saw the second one in theaters as well.

I read the book after I got the job. Cressida Cowell, who wrote these books, is hugely supportive of Dean DeBlois, our director. He made all three animated films.

He has known her for years and she’s always been the biggest champions of these films. It’s fascinating to read the books. There are many (12). Toothless was kind of a terrible terror.

There’s so much that Dean brought and expanded with Chris Sanders when they made the original animated film, there was a core Father-son storyline, which then was expanded upon.

The thing that is so special about what Cressida did is she made a story with lots of different types of dragons - a world of dragons.

There’s a variety and a wealth, and they’re colorful. The richness of that world lent brilliantly to animation. Then it was about how to bring that to live action?

Talk to me about the opening set piece of the dragon attack on the village. How do you time and pace that when there’s so much VFX? And how does that pacing and timing evolve as you progress?

The interesting thing with the opening sequence of the film, you have to think about where we stop. I guess there’s finally a time cut after the brazier crashes through the village, then we cut to Hiccup being publicly shamed by Stoick.

Up to that point that’s running around 11 or 12 minutes. A lot’s happening. We’re introducing a world. We’re introducing a village. We’re introducing not just a dragon attack, but many different types of dragons, and what their qualities are, and how they behave.

We’re introducing Hiccup. We’re introducing the chief, then revealing that he’s Hiccup’s father. We’re introducing all the other recruits, especially Astrid. We’re introducing Gobber, who’s kind of a surrogate father to Hiccup. It’s a lot of information.

We now have this live action adaptation genre. Disney obviously spearheaded and really got that going. This film is Universal dipping their toe in the well.

Having worked on The Little Mermaid before this, the interesting thing is the question of how much do you change and how much do you stay true to the material that came before? You’re kind of damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

The material is so beloved that it warrants this live action adaptation, but at the same time, if you change anything, there’s a lot of people that are going to hate that. And if you don’t change anything, you’re going to get criticized for it.

So the important conversations - even before going into the dragon attack, which I will get to that open – about the film and where we were toeing that line and what we were going to evolve and change.

There is literally a moment in the film that’s an “editorial cover.” It is - to the frame – identical to the animated film, something so iconic and perfect.

Wyatt Smith, ACE in his cutting room

The interesting thing about the dragon attack - like any big action set piece - there’s more little journeys with stunt pieces and other little aspects of dragon attacks. There’s longer fleshed-out dialogue, but it all becomes too much.

So it’s just basic editorial practice to cut it down. The good thing is that we had mostly a practical set for the core of the village, so there was real footage to work with that sequence just because of the nature of the night shooting.

There’s quite a balance of second unit footage in that material as well, especially because there are explosions and specific set pieces that would be picked up by second unit down the road. We were filming in Belfast around February of 2024 or so.

It was very dark and cold and rainy all the time in Belfast, so there were different things working against it.

Originally we did not carry the sequence with voice-over - which is very familiar and iconic to the animated film. Originally, we started with a dragon’s POV. You actually entered into the movie from the perspective of the dragons.

Ultimately, with all the things that I listed going on in this sequence, it’s too much work for the audience. It’s too much for the sake of the whole movie that comes after it.

The most important thing is introducing Hiccup, introducing that the world viewed through his perspective, which is not how everybody else sees the world. That helped make all the decisions to tailor it down.

But we still felt that without the voiceover that further secured you in Hiccup’s head. It was also too much information to try to take at once and carry forward without  just kind of sitting and processing it all before we haven’t actually continued into the story.

Thankfully no one was riding dragons at that point in the movie so it wasn’t as difficult to imagine and put together because there were a lot of practical elements to it.

It was really a matter of figuring out how to engage the audience and excite the audience, but not overwhelm the audience or make it them sit there wondering, “Where’s the dragon film I know and love?”

Final timeline

Let’s address that since you started down that path: what kind of creative conversations did you and the director have about what film are we making? Are we making the identical film or something completely different or some hybrid?

The idea was always a hybrid. For instance, not having the voiceover in the opening sequence. The interesting thing about this film is the third act is so well structured and so exciting with the big dragon attack at the end with the Red Death.

It’s kind of weird that we had a third act that didn’t have a problem and was so strong, and it was really the entrance to the film that it needed the most focus. There were specific conversations about where we would be shot for shot.

The most shot-for-shot was always going to be the forbidden friendship sequence, when Hiccup finally brings the fish to Toothless in the cove and they have that bonding. and that’s the touch. And that was I mean, it’s so memorable. It’s iconic. It’s the poster.

It’s such an unbelievable piece of music that John Powell wrote - similarly with Test Drive, where Hiccup has developed the whole pedal system with the prosthetic tail.  All that wish fulfillment and joy of flying a dragon comes true to reality.

There’s a lot there that is shot-for-shot while also making it real, because in an animated world there are a lot of camera movements and character movements that are just not physically possible when we try to imagine Toothless as a living, breathing, muscular character. Those two sequences we always knew would be exactly the same.

What we did find, though, is in the case of the opening dragon attack with film, the more we drifted it away, it didn’t feel comfortable. There was a little unease. It wasn’t quite clicking into place.

And when we started to play with putting the voiceover to it, it’s amazing how well it gelled. It fit together.

So that was a sequence that we then accepted that - while not shot-for-shot, structurally - it follows the same pattern and the way we introduce information.

When Hiccup is setting up the Mangler, there’s a great little flurry of edits in there. Can you talk about building that and changing the rhythm up a little bit? Because it just felt great.

We love The Mangler. I love the very first reveal with the double shots that takes out a Viking. It’s a fun little joke that it’s double-barreled. In terms of all those fast, fun edits, I always think of “showtime” from All that Jazz. Alan Heim’s brilliance of the Alka-Seltzer and the the pills and everything like that.

So it was fun to create that rhythm. That was mostly shot with second unit. The Mangler did work. It did rise up. All the ratchets and everything and the bows and all did what it was supposed to do, but not at the speed that you would want. There are a couple quick montages in the film. That’s one of them.

The other is when Hiccup builds Toothless’ prosthetic tail. That’s where you run into the challenge of: you just want it to be real. If you watch the animated films, they’re incredibly quick shots. There’s no bogus shots in there.

They’re all how this thing functions. We tried to maintain that, but if you actually tried to tell the same story with all the actual mechanics of it, you’d probably go and get some popcorn while that was still playing out on screen, so it was picking the hero moments of it, most importantly, seeing that there was genuinely this rolled up, netted cartridge that rolled back and was flung by the bow.

So it did work, but it obviously needed an editorial pop to just make it fun and effective, then you end it in silence. My favorite part is that you’re racing and all these things are happening and exploding and fire.

Then all of a sudden it’s quiet, and he’s just alone in a hilltop with a burning village in the background. The most complicated thing of that is visually we had this beautiful village set. The center of the village was all built, but this is him at quite a distance. So that was actually shot on a soundstage.

I think we had about a four-foot square patch of grass that Hiccup was standing on. It was easy for me to cut all the action of it, but I felt very bad for visual effects because they were given as little as possible to actually have to expand and build the shots with the world around it. But Christian Manz, our visual effects supervisor, just did it all brilliantly.

At the LA premiere with VFX Supervisor CHRISTIAN MANZ and animation supervisor GLEN McINTOSH

You mentioned second unit a couple of times, and that’s always a trick for these action movies is that you have all the first unit stuff come in, but then you’re waiting for a second unit footage to kind of flesh things out.

It’s quite normal for a second unit to be cleaning stuff up for a long time. Those arena sequences - and there’s a lot of arena set pieces - when the recruits first walk into the arena for the first time and they fight a Gronckle.

They went on for the entire length of the shoot. There were always places where I would either sit with the storyboard artist or sometimes I could just slug in a beat or steal a frame from the animated film or previs to represent a moment.

We had a point here that I could always shape things out. I can’t wait for all that material to cut it, because it’s more useful for me to cut the material I have from main unit, then bring second unit into my trailer, review all the material, talk about all the options that would make it kind of fit in the best, rather than just saying, “Well, let’s see how it goes.”

I’m a big believer in engaging second unit or plate units or stunt units and really trying to work through what were meant to get so that we’re the most efficient, especially when some of those things had to be shot at night, often in the rain.

Editorial white board

You mentioned engaging those units. You’re initiating conversations with those units yourself?

I feel like I need to help whether they want it or not. I tend to try to show up at least 5 or 6 weeks of pre-production before filming begins so that I’m meeting all the people and we’re talking stuff through.

Anything I can do to help the shoot. I’ll go to tell the costume department and the hair and makeup department, and say, “At any point in time if you want to come sit and watch on a big screen what this footage looks like, let’s do that.”

Anything that helps people see their work and know what they’re doing. If it takes even an iota of work off of Dean’s shoulders when he’s directing the film, great, because quite often, especially on the bigger films, not everybody talks to each other and things fall through the cracks. And not only do I inherit the cracks, but I can see them. So yeah, I talk to people quite a bit.

Let’s talk about balancing the tones in the opening battle between humor and terror and action. What were the discussions around that? What factors later in the movie inform those decisions?

There are a few places where it’s very non-traditional, like the first flight, and why you see him flying before we make a meal out of actually flying. But where the pockets of action were in the film were in a decent place.

Tone was an interesting one, though, because this is Universal’s first foray into this. We weren’t 1,000% confident about how young we wanted to go. The idea is never to replace the animated film. It’s beautiful, it’s iconic. But you know what? It plays really well for a four year old. The live action tends not to, and that’s a big decision to make.

So tone was an interesting one. Before we got John Powell’s actual score, we were trying lots of film scores the way you would normally temp score a film. It was interesting to see where it got too dark or too heavy. Dean is about wish-fulfillment.

There was a style of filmmaking in the 80s that was just so satisfying. You have this dream and at the end of the movie, you live that dream. Just because something’s live action doesn’t mean it has to be so dark and so serious.

There are some very heavy moments in this movie without the movie having to be dragged down. There’s fun and there are definitely places where we get to laugh out loud. The most important thing is for Hiccup to feel real and the relationship with his father and his struggle with the Viking community to feel as real as possible.

When we started to put in the John Powell music cues, that helped a lot with the tone. John’s music to these movies is so iconic. He was nominated for an Oscar for the first film. That music does have such adventure to it.

Dinner with Skywalker Sound - LEFF LEFFERTS, BRIAN CHUMNEY and SARAH SHAW with music editor SIMON CHANGER and mixer PAUL MASSEY

What other assets did you have available to you from the first film in your editing system? I’m assuming an Avid?

We cut in Media Composer. We had all three animated films as well as their split tracks. Having dragon vocals helped a lot.

My team and I can make explosions and footsteps and creaks and all this type of stuff, but to find a coy dragon vocal? That’s not something you’re just going to pull from the library.

The good thing is we could pull from the animated films because there were specific things that Dean would have in his memory, like, “There’s a great moment in the third film when Toothless does this thing… grab that sound for now.”

Dean quickly introduced me to Skywalker Sound, where we worked with, Randy Thom, Leff Lefferts, Brian Chumney, Sarah Shaw, and many other people as well.

The amazing thing is that Randy vocalizes Toothless and most of the dragons for all the animated films.

They build packages for us as we need of each of the various dragons including mountains of Toothless vocals, including lots of like explorations that didn’t even make it into the original film but since we were in live action, it was actually helpful to see where maybe they stuck a little better.

Once the edit was further along and we started to do turnovers, we would very quickly get passed this pack of dragon vocals, which Randy Thom still performs brilliantly.

It’s incredible to watch how Dean will give notes like he’s giving them to an actor, then we get back these vocal performances of a creature that are just stunning.

Is Randy really preforming the vocals or is he creating them from sounds?

It’s both. There are a certain sounds where he’s manipulating things that exist in the real world. There’s a certain amount of synthesizing things, but there’s a lot that just is clearly a vocal performance. He has his own special sauce and process.

The biggest challenge with a movie like this is that if Toothless was alive and with us, he’d be number two on the call sheet.

I’ve had the experience of working with virtual characters before - like Sebastian in The Little Mermaid - so I’m familiar with the process of puppeteering and pre-visualization and working a lot with plates and sonically creating movement and things like that that just help you imagine something before it’s really on screen, because it is a long process, but not to the level that I experienced on this film.

Toothless is so much of this movie and there is so much performance that needs to not be anthropomorphic.

It needs to be an animal with a lot of personality as well, so it was incredibly helpful to have that access to Skywalker.

It was similar with our puppeteer who performed Toothless on-set with the scale head, so all the eye lines and everything for visual effects were correct. All the slinking and the moving - there was a physical aspect of Toothless on set.

It was just a head and the puppeteer in a black suit. Glen McIntosh was an animator that Dean’s known for years who worked on the Jurassic films. That was so much about those key poses and behaviors of how that musculature could work.

We used Framestore, London, Melbourne, Montreal and Mumbai, and he was our Framestore London supervisor and Ken Garcia, the head animator under him.

All of these people were creating Toothless, so the big challenge was just how do you really time and make a character like that work with all these different steps and stages and tools?

I was happy that I was able to pull the experiences I’ve had and the things that I’ve learned along the way to apply it to this, because, if I had never done it before, I unquestionably would have been overwhelmed. It’s just so much to have to manage it all the time.

Can you talk about what the value is of your previous experience in managing that?

Understanding the steps is huge. When you’re watching a puppeteer to not just watch and think, “Mason (the puppeteer) is in the shots and we’ll have to composite him out.”

You have to look at the puppeteer’s performance and what it’s bringing out in the live actor, so having experience going into that and not just being amused by the process or just thinking, “We’ll just get rid of that half of the frame and put in Toothless.”

You really want to look into what the puppeteer is bringing and how the live-action actors are playing off it to really get the most confidence in those takes, because it’s expensive and time consuming to change them later.

But also just having something physical on set with the actor does influence the performance a lot, as opposed to just a plate.

The important thing is just understanding. David Brenner taught me on the fourth Pirates film about how things move through the frame when they’re not fully there.

For example, we have our puppeteer, but sometimes we also had representations of a tail and a tail length and an action, but not always.

So it’s also sometimes adjusting framing slightly, just trying to imagine more of what could happen there, but also understanding that then that goes into a very rough block, which is incredibly crude, then you go through many different levels of animation.

Ultimately, once you have animation final, then you have CFX. You have all these steps and it’s knowing where best to get all your notes in, because if you don’t say it now, it’s never going to happen or you’re just going to affect quality to try to throw in a curveball later.

So it was helpful, having been through this a bunch of times between Doctor Strange or The Little Mermaid or things like that to best interact with visual effects.

I know when to speak up. Some would argue I speak up too much, but also knowing where’s that moment where you’ve got to let them bake and try to be patient and let it happen, because anything you do now just derails that process.

So I’m grateful to have been able to come into that with this. There was a lot of communication always from pre-production to production to post. Everybody was talking all the time, always saying what’s on their mind if you got vetoed or overruled, great.

But the fact is, is nobody was waiting to express what they felt and drop some bomb down the road. So it was very simpatico. And I think it helps just bring the quality to the film.

Did you say CFX?

Creature effects. It’s a very big category. I’m probably not that qualified to speak on  it, but it’s like if you have this great animation where Toothless moves from here to here when he comes to a stop, maybe this part has a little more fat on him and it jiggles a bit. That’s CFX.

Or if the animation is perfect, but there’s a place where maybe Mason’s hand isn’t fully connecting in the right way, maybe they’ll nudge out a piece of Toothless a little bit to fill in. It’s subtle things, but you need your animation locked down.

So you have to make sure that anything you feel that is either hurting an actor’s performance or stealing the scene, or if it would that create a better eyeline or a better moment… when in the process do you say that?

Because at a certain point, it’s done. It takes an army to put Toothless on the screen credibly. And not just Toothless. There’s tons of personalities to the other dragons as well, but they didn’t express themselves in the way that Toothless did, so that Toothless journey was huge.

Obviously, moving forward with the franchise that’s going to be one of the big challenges because now you know that one of the dragons will go on to become Astrid’s dragon, then suddenly there’s that personality coming into play and that process is going to evolve.

It’s a trick when you don’t actually have such an important character on screen as a living, breathing thing.

Story cards on a wall

Let’s talk about intercutting the training sessions in The Trial of Flame with Hiccup going off to visit Toothless. Was that intercutting exactly as scripted, or did you have to massage in a bit?

That all holds fairly true to the design of the animated film. It’s also important to say that the animated film isn’t broken, so a lot of that story structure is sound.

There were things that bothered Dean over the years - having lived with the animated films for so long - that he wanted to correct some of it: fleshing out the backstories and just giving more character to all the other recruits.

I think we did great work with Astrid. She’s a much more fleshed out character: where she comes from, what she’s about.

It’s much the same with Snotlout and that whole echoed father/son relationship throughout the movie.

I was always questioning if that was going to take too much screen time away from the Hiccup/Stoick father/son relationship, but I can tell you, it’s 39 seconds of screen time to remove the entire Snotlout storyline. But it really resonated.

Dean liked that the relationship is a systemic problem in the Viking world, not just this one kid. That’s a little tangent, but basically the issues with the arena scenes was always there’s so much more. Every one of the recruits has a special beat.

With the twins it might get a little too cartoony or funny. There were all these stunt pieces for Astrid in the very first arena scene. It’s all a matter of cutting it down.

The challenge I felt, and I know Dean and I had to wrestle with, certainly in the first reel of the film is if you’ve never seen the animated film before, you’re in for all of it and you love it.

But If you’ve seen the animated film before, you just want to get to Toothless. It’s tough because we want to keep all that information, and we want to flesh out these characters and make them more real and give more of a backstory to the Viking world and all of that.

But ultimately everybody asking, “But where was the thing on the poster?

We know it’s coming.” There’s a lot of impatience for that, even in internal screenings and friends-and-family screenings you could tell that there’s this whole thought, “Where’s Toothless? When do we get there?”

Any time we leave Toothless - once he’s introduced - you just start the stopwatch and you know when you’ve overstayed your welcome, which is good because the arena, even though we return to that location heavily four times as well as a bunch of other small periods, so there is a freshness to coming back to it all the time. So it made it easy to kind of move us through it.

I think the thing that was most important to me on the first arena sequence is making sure that we entered it through Astrid’s eyes, that helps build up her character. She wants to be chief.

This is her dream. Hiccups getting it by default. But this is all she’s ever wanted. Once that was established and we met a dragon, we’ve got to get out of there.

You alluded to this a little bit, but you have this previous movie, which, as you said, was not broken. It was a very popular, very effective film. So did that help that there weren’t a lot of structural changes? That’s one of those things that you find as an editor when you’re editing an original film: “Oh my gosh! I’ve got to drop this scene. I’ve got to re-arrange this section.” But you didn’t have to worry about that as much because they’d already handled most of the structural issues in the animated version…. True or not?

We did drop two scenes, one of which I don’t think anybody even thinks about, which is when Toothless gets mangled up in the rig in the early days of flying and Hiccup sneaks them through the village to fix it and Astrid almost catches him.

As much as it was a bummer to take away an interaction between Astrid and Hiccup, it’s kind of a ridiculous sequence. It was funny, and there are cute moments in it. But it’s so implausible.

Why can’t Hiccup just walk out into the woods with a pair of pliers and take the thing off? Also it makes Astrid seem kind of dumb. Astrid and Toothless are right there, so that’s an easy loss.

One that was more controversial is after that great test drive sequence, there was a little sequence with these little tiny dragons that was going to be staged on the Giant’s Causeway, which is a famous, beautiful area of outstanding beauty in Northern Ireland.

The decision to take that out was a little more complicated. We know that probably there are some diehard fans who are struggling with that. Looking at the animated film, we felt like it was really speaking to the four and five year olds to say out loud, we don’t understand anything about you.

It means looking at how the dragons behave, which is kind of the embodiment of the film, but more importantly, we saw the strength of the fact that Hiccup has the greatest moment in his life, successfully flying Toothless, then cutting immediately to his father accusing him of hiding something.

The strength of that outweighs the loss of the Giant’s Causeway where he learns that dragons aren’t so fireproof on the inside, which is part of how the Red Death is killed in the end, but ultimately blowing holes in the Red Death’s wings so that she can’t stop herself, and she is killed in that moment without having to have a whole scene to explain that Hiccup’s learned that they can burn inside.

So there are places where the animated filmhas things that are not that great for a live action film.

Talk to me about building a montage and how that maybe is a little different than a dialogue scene.

For example, the tail-making montage: We had all the pieces that would be the whole linear journey of making the tail, but we don’t have five minutes.

We have 45 seconds, so it’s just showing some shots that show Hiccup’s confident in what to do and then there were things he’s trying to figure out, The big thing is that that’s a mini-montage that very quickly goes into a five minute montage, which includes putting the tail on for the first time.

That whole sequence as a montage is way more fun to cut, as it’s trying to find the rhythms of it. It can’t move at the speed of the animated film. If I had used John Powell’s original montage cue there, I think I would have only maybe gotten halfway through it.

The live action just takes longer. There’s the story beat on the bridge where Hiccup’s being accused and rather than just being a shot there’s actual content to the dialogue, so it was more fun to flesh that out - to go through all of the scores for the animated film and build a good momentum to the whole thing. That’s very satisfying at the end.

You talked about how the tail making montage was much shorter, but then the flying montage after it was much longer. How did you determine, “We can’t do a five minute tail-making montage like they did in the animated film?”

We knew that either developing the characters further was a better use of screen time, but also, there’s a very strange thing in the flying in that we don’t make a big deal out of him flying for the first time. He straps the tail on, he gets whipped around the cove very quickly. He’s flying and he is saying, “It’s working!” 

Then the next time he’s in the Feather Canyon, he’s only got a rope attached to his foot trying to control the tail, which doesn’t work very well.

It’s clumsy and he’s mashing into things. We wanted all those things to be longer, because experiential flying was always the mantra of a live action film.

So we always knew we wanted to make those beats longer than they were in the animated film, but it always felt very strange to me.

Thankfully everybody goes with it, that we kind of don’t make a big deal out of the first time he’s flying, so that once he kind of had made the pedal system and it’s time for them to really show what they can do, then we do the “full meal.”

Part of what brings so much satisfaction to the test drive sequence is that you’re very unsatisfied by the earlier response. I think you’re just waiting for it.

But that to me is a very unusual structure. It’s borrowed a bit from the animated film, although we’ve actually made those earlier flying beats longer, but it was interesting to me to see how that works.

I think I’ve also learned over the years – and I see it as well in other movies – that people love training and learning new things. We learned this on Doctor Strange..

“Do we do we really need to see him learning?” Strange learns how to do all this stuff and when we would test the movie, people wanted ten times as much! They want to see how somebody becomes great. So we leaned into it.

Rocky needs to train!

Exactly! You remember him punching meat more than you have moments in the ring. It’s true.

You were talking about the meal of the big flight sequence and how that’s going to be something that everybody’s going to want to experience and feel. How did you edit that when you were in those early stages where you just had plates and you just had previs and nothing fun to look at.

The good thing is that we knew what it needed to achieve from the animated film. We started with a previs that was built right off the animated film, but more realistic camera movement and dragon movements that stuff I worked on with Dean and with our visual effects supervisor, Christian, before filming started.

It was very important, not only because some of that would factor into the overall design of Toothless exactly how we’d work, but it was also very important to not have those sequences locked out, to understand what the rig needed to do that Mason would sit on. It all had to be programed a bit off of that previs.

That’s something that editorially I put a hand on in previs so that we were all communicating as best as possible. We felt the previs was good - it was based off the animated film but it had the issue I always have with previs: it needs a lot of close-ups! They say, “But we’re going to shoot that.” I’d say, “Yeah, but then your sequence is three times longer! Why don’t we start to work that stuff?”

Like any successful CGI-heavy film, you use live actors as much as possible. There are, of course, all-CG shots in there, but there’s a lot of Mason being pulled around, tumbled around, sitting on rigs. So a sequence like that needs a lot of planning and steps.

We knew it had to be one of those things where - out in the real world - people would cheer or applaud in the movie theater.

And thankfully that’s happened. So there was a lot of pressure on that sequence in terms of what to look at once you’re in the planning stages of a sequence, and then it starts to evolve into the live action plates and all that, you always know what’s going on.

You’re never confused. It wasn’t hard to maintain that. The hardest part is there’s nothing to look at for a long time. So in terms of showing the film, I would have screening versions of sequences where I put in animated shots or previs shots, even though I had live action, but it’s just a bit of blue on a stage and a piece of Toothless that’s mechanically moving the way it’s supposed to with Mason doing his best up there.

Shipping container edt rooms

Where did you edit? You talked about doing a lot of this in Belfast.

We filmed in Belfast. There were two different studios. All the backlot work - the village, the arena - that was all done at Titanic Studios, where they literally built the Titanic.

But the strikes pushed our start - which is why we were filming through the cold winter.

And I think HBO needed that stage. Then we moved to do some stage work at Belfast Harbor Studios, which is just on the other side of the water there. As far as editorial went, there’s a great little post-production facility called Yellow Moon Post.

They have mixing, color, dailies, edit rooms, all of that. Really nicely done. So, Thomas Lane, our first assistant editor was there with our second assistants from Belfast and a PA dealing with dailies, myself and our visual effects editor, Tom Hannibal.

We were in shipping containers in a sea of mud on the backlot at Titanic Harbor. Dean would come through oftentimes early in the morning to take a look at a first draft of a scene. Producers would come through… D.O.P. …everybody would come through.

So I couldn’t be separated from set. Then Visual Effects is also in a shipping container right next to mine, so we had a constant conversation going, with Christian at all times or Chris Raymond or any visual effects producers to see places where I saw sequences expanding or not quite getting where they needed to be and asking, “Oh, should we go shoot that again to make sure we really have that tight?”

London editorial team - 1st Assistant Editor THOMAS LANE, assistant editor ESTHER BAILER and editorial trainee ANA FORTE

Belfast was the core of that. Then we did post-production in London. We worked at Vivid Rental on Wardour Street. We took over a building.

It was Tom Lane and Tom Hannibal came with me. We brought on Simon Changer, our music editor, Esther Bailey, our London assistant editor and our trainee visual effects was downstairs.

They took up a ton of space. We brought in Ryan Alborough, our assistant visual effects editor. We had our two supervisors, Ben Seward, Rebecca Adams. We needed a whole building, and we did all of our post-production there.

Except then there were two months where we worked in LA before presenting the director’s cut. The producers live there, the studio’s there, Dean lives there half the year, so it made sense for us to kind of go there and dial in towards the director’s cut there.

We also did a certain amount of mixing. We did one of our mixes at the Skywalker Ranch, which is a whole other story. I could have that conversation for many hours of that weird, surreal, magical experience of going up to the ranch.

But for the most part, it was London. That’s where we did all our finishing. We did our scoring at Air Studios, we did our final mix and final color at Goldcrest.

London edit room

What was the general schedule like?

: I think I was almost exactly 18 months on this project: roughly six months in Belfast and 12 months in London, with some gaps in L.A.

…and shooting taking place for how long?

We started filming, I think the second week of January 2024, and we finished like the third week of May or something like that. I think that sounds about right. It’s like four and a half, five months. It’s seems like the right amount of time for this.

LA premiere with LA editorial team - assistant editor CARLOS CASTILLON and post-PA DIEGO COBIAN

Are there any of the scenes that you feel like you want to walk us through?

Editorial called the scene where Hiccup first touches Toothless “Forbidden Friendship.” That’s also what they called the music cue. Visual effects called it “Befriending Toothless.”

That sequence and the Test Drive sequence, there’s an evolution to it because of what it takes for live action performance and nuance.

So there are places where the cutting pattern does break a bit. Certainly in Test Drive it breaks more. But Forbidden Friendship is one of those things where those two sequences are the ones that we knew can’t change.

They’re the most iconic parts of the animated film. So even before filming, we always said, these are going to be incredibly similar to the animated film in their structure and their shapes, music, everything.

One of the things that Dean and I consciously did is that basically the six shots before Toothless leaves at the end of the Forbidden Friendship sequence - if you put them side to side to the animated film - they’re to the frame.

Getting everybody into that position up to that moment does look like an animated character, and Toothless moves slower as a real huge thing. The cutting pattern’s very similar and shot designs very similar.

Director’s cut timeline

But there was a moment where, by design, we decided we’re going to do a little editorial cover, because this is something that’s iconic and perfect as far as those sequences go.

For the Test Drive sequence there’s more evolution to it, but they’re a little hard for me to talk about because there’s a little bit of a handcuff of: “I am copying something.”

But I’m copying something with intention. I also really understand why I’m copying something. It’s so much better when they say, “Just make it like that.” I’d reply, “But why?”

But with that sequence, I know why. It was the same thing for John Powell. There’s some different instrumentation, and because things are a little longer, there are places where there are loops and vamps that are different, but Dean pretty much said the same thing to John: “You made it perfect the first time, so make it perfect again.”

The chart is very similar. That said, there are scenes that I wish were able to live longer on the screen.

One of my favorite scenes in the whole film is the Great Hall after the big opening dragon attack. It’s when we meet Stoick as a politician. What is great about that scene is it is new and unique to the live action.

That scene existed very briefly in the animated film but in the live action film, you get the backstory that dragons are a problem in the whole world, so all the best of all these different tribes from everywhere came together, and they’ve been trying to find this nest and fight this battle.

You start to understand the different ethnicities and the culture that has come together to work the way that it is. Gerry (Gerard Butler) is spinning plates.

Obviously, he’s wrestling with the fact that his kid is this kind of broken wheel in the town that nobody knows how to deal with and gets into trouble.

Obviously they’re being attacked and he’s convinced everybody that they need to go do this thing, but they haven’t been succeeding. But to watch Gerry as Stoick… he’s amazing. To see all that subtlety in his eyes as he’s going there trying to convince the town.

The original full scene of that is maybe a minute and a half longer. I love that full scene, but of course, then at the tail end is when he sits with Gobber after all the Vikings left, and they have a real heart to heart. It’s too much same.

It’s too much of a scene when the audience knows that Toothless has been snagged by the Mangler and is lying somewhere.

So unfortunately, as much as I love that material, that’s where I felt like we had to kill darlings to serve the film, to get the audience to Toothless faster.

For me, that was one of my most favorite things to cut. It’s all just close ups of faces and a disgruntled group that Stoick just - with such precision - turns them into a rowdy crowd that’s going to go kill some dragons.

First Assembly timeline

To elaborate on that decision, it wasn’t that the film was 90 seconds too long that you had to cut it down, it was that the specific story beat was too long and held you from the revelation of Toothless.

It’s really the ticking clock with Toothless more than anything. I thought everybody performed well. Jerry was amazing, but it really is that impatience of getting to Toothless in the woods and starting the Hiccup/Toothless journey.

Hiccup and Stoick is the most important storyline in the film and Hiccup and Toothless is the other one. Then you have Hiccup and Astrid. So you kind of have to pick a lane that you’re going in. So some of those things are heartbreaking to me.

If we hadn’t had the animated film, I think that scene probably would have lived in its full length. But that’s just the stuff you have to do to make a tight movie: make people want more.

Is there anything else you want to talk about specifically?

There were some other challenges to the film: getting Astrid right was a matter of some degrees because we expanded her character out more.

She was a little two-dimensional in the animated film. But the hard challenge we had is because she’s tough and she has this chip on her shoulder. She doesn’t have any easy path to anything. She comes from nothing. She’s had to work our ass off.

She wants to be chief. She has so much struggle and fire in her. She could also come across too harsh. There’s a scene in the library. It’s like a little dinner scene with the recruits.

That’s probably where, Dean and I did the most work on Astrid. We dialed a bunch of things along the way, like that entrance into the arena where you can see that we’re looking at this dream that she wants to lead, but also taking out some of the beats where she might have been having an extra joke at Hiccup’s expense, where she just seemed like another bully at school, which is what we didn’t want.

There’s this moment where she’s about to leave the library and Hiccup says, “Maybe they’re not as bad as we think they are” - which is just ludicrous to anyone who’s been kind of indoctrinated into what Burk’s about – and Astrid has this amazing look where she stops herself and you see it in her eyes.

She has this little skip in her eye where “I should just leave, but that’s not what a leader would do.”

In the original shape of the scene that pause did so much to make me love her as a character and understand that she wants to be a real leader, and that means dealing with the people you don’t want to deal with, which resonates a lot to our times as well. We need a little bit more of that.

Need some Astrids. So that that was another challenge in the live action version of this film is that just giving her screen time didn’t make her more of a character. Giving her that backstory was one thing, but it was really seeing how she interacted, looking for all those little leader qualities she showed.

It was just making sure that we didn’t we didn’t bury them, because I definitely screwed that up a few times. But I think we threaded that needle.

Wyatt, thank you so much for your time in chatting with us today. Here’s tp the next live action Dragons film!

They’re working away. They’ve got a lot more dragons to develop. Thankfully Universal – before we even released the film - they were so confident and so happy with what Dean had created - and we all helped him with that - they were already greenlighting a sequel.

Congratulations. Looks like you’ve got some work to do!

Thank you so much.

Belfast editorial including assistant editors SARAH MILLS and CHRISTOPHER WHITE and our PA CARA O’BRIEN