Such alliances are aimed not only at making the best film possible, but doing it in a cost-effective way.Ībove: How to Train Your Dragon 2 features detailed characters. “That’s why we have Intel as a substantial partner in all of this.” “Moore’s Law has been a key transformer of every business and every product, including ours,” said Wallen. Those tools transformed the way that animators worked from a process of tweaking spreadsheets to something that resembles the old-fashioned way of drawing images with pencil and paper. It also created an artist’s animation software program called Premo, made so that artists could get back to drawing their characters and landscapes with pens and touch-sensitive computer displays. Part of the reason for that return on investment is the efficiency of the cloud computing infrastructure that DreamWorks Animation built over the last decade, said Lincoln Wallen, chief technology officer of DreamWorks Animation, in an interview.ĭuring the making of the film, DreamWorks built a software platform dubbed Apollo. The software is extremely powerful and it allows our artists to express themselves.” “Having so many dragons and an army of thousands of soldiers is something we couldn’t have done before.

“There are no limits on what we can do now,” said Dean DeBlois, director of the film, said in an interview. We took a tour of the Redwood City, California-based company to unmask the process behind the making of the movie. The marriage of technology and art at the Silicon Valley campus of DreamWorks Animation is what makes computer-animated movies possible.

Dragon frame cost