Arguably the most famous scene from the How to Train Your Dragon franchise is the boop. You know the boop. It’s the moment when Viking teen Hiccup and adorable Night Fury Toothless make a genuine connection for the first time, with the dragon’s nose pressing into Hiccup’s hand.
More than 15 years after the release of Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders’ adaptation of Cressida Cowell’s novels, DeBlois has revisited How to Train Your Dragon as a live-action movie, recreating shot-for-shot the famous boop scene.
Mashable UK Editor Shannon Connellan sat down with DeBlois and How to Train Your Dragon stars Mason Thames and Nico Parker to get an idea of how the film remade the moment.
“We wanted to recreate as faithfully as we could that scene through live-action on a stage with our cove set, but almost shot-for-shot that exact moment — and also later the test-drive scene when they’re flying over the clouds,” DeBlois told Mashable.
“We wanted those to be really faithful as a tribute to the fans. The way that we achieved it really was relying very heavily upon our team of puppeteers, namely Tom Wilton, who was operating our Toothless. We had a foam head for Toothless, and we had a body and a tail. His puppeteering partner, Sarah, had worked out the footsteps in the sand and the path between all of the drawn lines, and how that was going to work, and it just became this dance.”
Thames, who has a background in ballet, trained hard for the scene, in which the director had composer John Powell’s score playing on set.
“You know, it probably looks just like I’m stepping over some stuff, but going into it, we had about a week and a half of training and practicing that, getting every step on each note for the song — because we had the song playing,” Thames said. “It was a dance, and I think ballet really helped with getting that down.”
“When we started playing John Powell’s music on top of it, the whole stage just got really quiet, and it transformed,” DeBlois added. “It felt like a moment of real wonder in the midst of all of this chaos of filmmaking, where people felt like they were making something special.”
How to Train Your Dragon hits cinemas in the UK June 9 and in the U.S. June 13.
