How the creators of the Dragon Prince reorganized the animation of the series

Animated series of Netflix The dragon prince, co-created by Avatar the last master of the air the chief writer Aaron Ehasz and Unexplored Game developer and producer Justin Richmond has just come out of his second season. It is a powerful step forward for the fantastic series. I recently spoke extensively to Ehasz and Richmond about stylistic changes and narrative progress made by the show during Season 2.

In the first part of this interview, Ehasz and Richmond presented some of the major events of Season 2, including how they balanced their villains to make them so attractive, what effects black magic has on its users and why the season 2 has been so long, sequences without words as part of the storytelling process. In the second part, they discuss the animation choices of the series, including how they have changed since season 1 in response to viewers' comments, how the animators use the camera rules to create a story. more realistic action and why each episode ends with Easter eggs.

This interview has been modified for reasons of brevity and clarity.

You have a little reorganized the style of animation this season. How is it technically different from last season?

Aaron Ehasz: When we first saw the show, we talked to Bardel Entertainment, who had directed a movie called The Prophet. They were trying to innovate using a CG pipeline and using a cel shading, but using techniques to help them feel more prepared by hand so that artists would be more involved in the application of a personal touch, not to get the computer or machine. to feel, Uncanny Valley you sometimes get cel-shaded animation.

Sure The dragon prince, we wanted to go even further to take advantage of the advantages of a CG and 3D pipeline. We wanted details on the design of the characters, in the costumes and sets, which you really can not get in a traditional 2D animation. The animators working with these 3D models are artists, right? They are excellent in what they do. They are clever in the way they move characters. It was therefore largely to achieve an artistic style and animated by hand.

Throughout this journey, one of the decisions was that if you animate on animated using computer animations, the rendering is sometimes so smooth that it becomes floating and that it begins to lose weight and to have an impact. You begin to perceive things as being perfectly displaced in space by computers. So we animated keyframes and removed images to give weight to the movements, as well as impact and punch. We felt that it was successful and beautiful and layered. But there was a significant subset of viewers who found the frame rate …

Justin Richmond: Putting.

AE: This feedback was consistent among a subset of fans. So we adjusted for the second season. We always wanted the same stylistic approach. We did not want to animate them because we wanted it to be as practical as possible. Many more shots are on two, but some effects may be on those for more fluidity. We have adjusted and we are still trying to find the right compromise, but we think it is better. Hope the fans feel the same.

Image: Netflix

Since you liked the original look, do you feel like losing something by changing animation?

JR: We are happy. We do not lose anything. Whenever you do more things you already know how to do, you can do it better. So, there are many things beyond the number of images and animations that we have been able to improve, simply because we now know a lot more about how the series is rendered, about the how the rendering works, where it falls apart with the elements are delicate. We are really happy with Season 2 and hope that if we have another season, we will be even better in this respect.

What is difficult in your process? What are the most difficult things to do with your system?

JR: When taking CG photos in the shade, you have a choice of how the shadows appear and how they move. And some things have very different end results. We chose a look that we think reproduces 2D very well, but it takes a lot of work on the rendering pipeline, as opposed to right shadows in CG format. There was a learning curve there. The show looks great, but it was very difficult to get there. There were many steps involved. While this remains true, we now know what these steps are, so it's easier to follow them. And it's easier to set up plans so we can get those results faster. We have an entire painting department that takes care of the plans once they have finished and cleans them up. When you can make plans that should not be cleaned, you get better results faster. So it's one thing.

The other thing is the line thickness. All ink lines are a very complex technological element. During the first season, we learned the limits of its operation. The guys from Bardel could say a lot more about it, but basically we're moving faster, which saves us more time in the end to tweak things instead of fixing them.

Image: Netflix

The dragon attack sequence feels visually different from many other characters' moves. Has he been treated differently behind the scenes?

JR: There are several things. I am not an animation expert. I attended an animation school, but I am not an animation expert! I know that many of these sequences configure cameras and sequences in a very different way, so that they feel much more visceral. The filmmakers pay much more attention to how things move quickly in the frame, to get the impression of being on the ground with a flying dragon. How to have this feeling of surprise, how to make it funny again. They spend a lot of time choreographing things like that. I remember that when we set up this series of plans, we did not have a setting yet. The director of the series had a diagram and said, "It's going to fly like that, so here's how the city has to be built so it makes sense."

In this sequence, they came essentially to us. We wrote something like, "A dragon attacks the city."[[[[Laughs]We did not have a lot of description because we really trusted our administrators. They deliberately said, "Well, if we were in this city, how could we shoot that with real cameras?" Our series director and episode directors believe as much as possible not to do a lot of crazy things about them. virtual cameras because it breaks the feeling that this is a real world.There is a set of very specific rules around our cameras, designed for the appearance to be real.They pay very close attention to this.However, when you have a dragon attacking, you can do more crazy things and get out of it, so they can play a little bit, and it's more fun to have some footage to make sure they feel epic and awesome.

At one point, there was an extra part of that sequence that ended up being cut short. There were some crazy loops, like the way the ballista was delighted, and a bunch of other stuff they were playing on storyboards. We said, "We are starting to lose some of the drama in the sequence." I think directors really like to spend time making it real, like, "What would it be like to be in a city literally shooting a dragon?" "Just respect for the guys from Bardel. They love this show as much as we do, and they want it to be what we want. So I think that they put a lot of extra love into these sequences. You know, it's fun to shoot Callum for a few days and then launch "Dragon Attack!" It's awesome! It's a bit more liberating.

Image: Netflix

The melee combat choreography is also very complicated. It reminds how Avatar the last master of the airThe combat sequences have been choreographed in terms of martial arts. Do they use physical models in the same way to install the choreography here?

JR: The filmmakers use the video reference, where they will say to themselves: "This is the pose, and I stand like that, you will attack me", and then they determine the physical spacing. But honestly, it's mostly that storyboard directors go through a lot of pbades to say, "OK, does that sound like Rayla and Soren are fighting?" Do you feel like they were in this space together? And then, in the big, it gets a lot more complicated. "Okay, we have all these actors, and there's all this space, we have to make sure it works. Quite often, they send us overheads and models, and we say, "Okay, that sounds pretty much okay," and then the filmmakers just make things look amazing. There is quite an art to it, like a mysterious thing, these guys really have control of this season.

The small still images of the end credits have attracted a lot of fan attention. Some of them have elicited elaborate theories, and some are just small, fun illustrations of the episode's ideas. Who decides what they are going to be? What is the philosophy behind them?

AE: We do, and the writing team does. Listen, in part, these credits contain a list of names of people who work so hard for the series. They do incredible visionary work on Dragon Prince. And Netflix lets you skip those credits so easily. We wanted to give people a reason to appreciate the credits. We also wanted it to be taken for granted that each credit sequence is identical, but "Oh, that's the credits again." another part of the world during the same episode, where you say, "Oh, what's going on? This means that, in four episodes, this character will catch this character. With the whole series, we want people to be attentive and people who care about the details to be rewarded. It's the same with the credits.

Are we going to have the chance to see more of this 19-year-old sulking prince who will not eat his broccoli?

JR: You know, I hope. Do we need more of him?

AE: Yes we will.

JR: He gave it. Yes, we will see him again.

Wait, really?

AE and JR: Yes!