page_title: How to Train Your Dragon 2
section_title: Animation
hierarchical_section_title: How to Train Your Dragon 2 / Production / Animation
caption_attribution_description: English: After watching a motion capture demonstration at the DreamWorks Animation studio in California, the President tried out the camera himself.
context_page_description: How to Train Your Dragon 2 is a 2014 American computer-animated action fantasy film loosely based on the book series of the same name by Cressida Cowell, produced by DreamWorks Animation and distributed by 20th Century Fox. It is the sequel to the 2010 computer-animated film How to Train Your Dragon and the second installment in the trilogy. The film was written and directed by Dean DeBlois, and stars the voices of Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler, Craig Ferguson, America Ferrera, Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, T.J. Miller, and Kristen Wiig, along with Cate Blanchett, Djimon Hounsou, and Kit Harington joining the cast. The film takes place five years after the first film, featuring Hiccup and his friends as young adults as they meet Valka, Hiccup's long-lost mother, and Drago Bludvist, a madman who wants to conquer the world.
  DeBlois, who co-directed the first film, agreed to return to direct the second film on the condition that he would be allowed to turn it into a trilogy. He cited The Empire Strikes Back and My Neighbor Totoro as his main inspirations, with the expanded scope of The Empire Strikes Back being particularly influential.
context_section_description: Over the five years before the film's release, DreamWorks Animation had substantially overhauled its production workflow and animation software. How to Train Your Dragon 2 was the first DreamWorks Animation film that used "scalable multicore processing", developed together with Hewlett-Packard. Called by Katzenberg as "the next revolution in filmmaking", it enabled artists for the first time to work on rich, complex images in real time, instead of waiting eight hours to see the results the next day. The film was also the studio's first film to use its new animation and lighting software through the entire production. Programs named Premo and Torch allowed much more subtlety, improving facial animation and enabling "the sense of fat, jiggle, loose skin, the sensation of skin moving over muscle instead of masses moving together."
  By the time production was complete, over 500 people had worked on the film at DreamWorks Animation's headquarters in Glendale, as well as its branch offices at PDI/DreamWorks in Redwood City and DreamWorks India in Bangalore.
caption: During a visit to DreamWorks Animation in November 2013, U.S. President Barack Obama tried a motion capture camera of the kind used to capture live-action reference performance for the film.[21]
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