The Cheat Sheet: Replica

This is Hiccup's Test Drive cheat sheet! I did this drawing a couple of months ago, and I do rather like it! I usually keep it hung up in my room (along with around twenty other HTTYD sepia drawings and sketches). You can see it clearly in the scene when he is pointing at. This picture looks better in person because I am not a great photographer! It is close to actual size (at least if Hiccup's hands are the same size as mine!). It is fairly accurate in color and sketching. Also, I did pay close attention to how the edges of the paper were cut in the film, and this replica is accurate-ish in that respect. Hope you all like it. 

How To Train Your Dragon! My favorite movie of all time...why? Entry 10

Alright, it's been a little while since I've posted one of these, but my internet has been trying to kill me! These entries take a little bit more time and a little bit more thought to create, but I believe I have gotten my thoughts together and my schedule in order! This will be another entry on the medium of HTTYD, not the heart of it. As I said before, the heart of the movie is what really matters, but the medium expresses it, and the medium of HTTYD is stunningly moving and beautiful! I can't just overlook it because it is really such a huge part of why I love the film even if it is not the main reason.

This entry will be on animation. Now, I need to define that term. Animation in CGI movies is really just making things, particularly characters, move. So that sounds pretty simple, right? Well it may be a simple thing, but it INCREDIBLY important! If the animators don't do a good job making the characters move, then you wind up with a movie that is dead and lifeless. If you get good animators, you can practically read a characters mind just by their hand gestures or facial expressions! HTTYD had GOOD animators! It is often subtle, but it is incredibly human. Hiccup, Stoick, Astrid, Gobber, all these characters have a certain human feel about them because the animators did their job! They were not sloppy, each character has a way that he or she expresses themselves. Wether it is Gobber throwing a sarcastic look or Hiccup pleading with his tight and then flailing hand gestures, all the animation is ridiculously brilliant! It makes the characters feel real, feel alive! You don't want to connect your emotions to a robot, you want to connect your emotions to a person! A big part of being a person is expressing yourself through your movement, wether you notice it or not! 

I particularly love Hiccup's mannerisms in the film! If you will note in the image above, Hiccup can actually pull some gestures that his mentor and father do as well! Realism! You think he just comes up with these on his own. His hands, his face, there is such a depth and range of emotion that he displays in the film! It really is brilliant, and it brings him out as such a great character! You feel like you know the guy! You can connect with him because he acts so much like a real person! He uses his hands to talk, he uses his facial expressions to convey emotion. Animating is a TOUGH job! One slip and a perfectly human character comes across as being robotic. No such slip for Hiccup. He is wonderfully fun to watch, and I love even the way he moves!

Next, Toothless! Good grief! If ever there was an award for character with the best animation, that dragon would win hands down! Why? Toothless cannot speak. Hiccup can talk, and even though we often feel his emotions through his facial expressions and gestures, he does eventually tell us how he feels. Toothless is not so lucky. The dragon's mood is only able to be expressed by his animation. He is an animal character and does not have many humanoid traits. This makes it all the harder. He must remain bestial while conveying humanish emotions. Complexity heaps upon complexity! How on earth are you going to get the audience to know what this dragon is thinking, feeling, wishing, dreaming!? Then into this fray jumps Gabe Hordos! He was Toothless's head animator, and he did a spectacular job! Toothless has many traits of common pets like dogs, cats, and even horses. Why? Because people know how those animals express themselves, they know what it is like to bond with that kind of animal. Now take out all of the less pleasant pet traits, toss in some epic dragonish ones, and you get Toothless! The result is stunning! There is no question about reading Toothless's emotions! The audience can see them like an open book! His movements remain realistic and animal like, yet he can express emotions that are deep and human! His range of thought is not just, happy, angry, hungry, sad. He can come across as thoughtful, curious, compassionate, caring, loving, grieving, teasing, and many, many more extremely deep emotions! He is not just a surface level character, and his animation allows him to express himself in a truly open way! It is really quite something, and I have yet to see any animated animal be handled better!

HTTYD Funnies number 2

So, when you spend an HUGE amount of time thinking about HTTYD, sometimes funny things happen, and sometimes they are only funny if you get the context. This next HTTYD related funny is probably the oldest one! Yep, three years ago. Man time has flown since then, but I still love Hiccup and Toothless just as much (if not more).

Alright on to the story. After my younger brother and I watched HTTYD we were immediately humongous fans! We bought up tons of merchandise, and I wound up buying the video game even though I did not have a system to play it on! We put all this merchandise in one room, and when friends would come over who had a game system, they would bring their system and we would play the HTTYD video game. Then that wound up also being the room in which we watched the HD trailer for the movie over, and over, and over, and over again! So, yes, this story has something to do with this particular room. While all this cool HTTYD stuff was happening someone gave my mother potpourri, and my mother did not really know where to put it. It wound up in that certain room. At first it was noticeable, but before long we never noticed the scent and we went on playing the game in that room, watching the trailer, messing with the merchandise, and just doing typical fan stuff. Then we left to go to my grandmother's house. We were gone for a week, and when I returned something really strange happened...

I walked into that room, smelled the extremely strong potpourri, and I thought to myself "It smells like How to Train your DRAGON in here...". But then I thought, "Oh no, that is just weird and stupid! Orange peachy scents have absolutely nothing to do with HTTYD, so why do I even think that?" I walked out of the room for a minute and then came back in. My brother was standing in the middle of the room sniffing. He gave me a thoughtful look and then said, "Man, it smells like How to Train your DRAGON in here!" My jaw dropped! It was hilarious! Who would have thought that weird potpourri would make us both think the EXACT same thing! We could not believe it! Funny how fandom works that way. Weird things happen when you live in the world of dragons and vikings!

Dragon Journal pages 9-10

We are sadly drawing near to the end of my Night Fury pages, but that still leaves a Nadder and a Gronckle! These pages are dedicated to the Night Fury in battle. All of this is free hand. Some of these techniques are a little tricky to notice in the film, but they are there. I hope you like them! As usual there is a translation key for the anglo saxon runes in my first post concerning this journal.

Dragon Journal pages 7-8

These next pages are dedicated to the lifestyle of Toothless. That means pretty much eating and sleeping. Other dragons' lifestyle pages will include how they act as infants and how they interact with their own kind, but due to his solitary status, we have never and may never see those kinds of things with Toothless. These images were all free handed, so you never actually see Toothless doing exactly what these images portray. That makes drawing them harder, but in the end it really is worth it! If you want to translate the page, the translation key is with the first of these journal posts. Hope you like it!

Looking Back...

This is one of my earliest HTTYD drawings. Man, the dvd had not even been released yet! Those were the days when HTTYD was everywhere! Advertisements, conversations, events, birthday parties, everybody loved that film! There was a lot of hype and excitement, and I was right in the middle of it! I convinced at least twelve people to go and watch the film, and I went to it three times in theaters. Then the hype and excitement died down, and we got no new HTTYD stuff until GotNF thirteen months later! That was a long wait, and it has been a really strange, but really cool three years of loving this movie! What is strange is that I think I might love the movie even MORE now than I did then! Even with no hype, even with no crowds wanting to discuss it with me, even with no birthday parties, or theater showings, HTTYD is STILL just as amazing! I feel like it has gripped me even more as I have watched it over these years, and I honestly hope and think that I will love this movie just as much as I do now for the rest of my life! 

HTTYD Funnies

So, after having been a fan for about three years now, I have had the rare, but fun, experience of events that happen to or with me that are both funny and HTTYD related!

I'll post these occasionally. I already mention the arena spectacular incident with the lady not know what a Night Fury was and then telling me that it was blue. I will tell that whole story sometime because there were a couple other hilarious events after that! This entry will be on something a little less  epic than the arena show.

I was out with my dad. He was shopping for clothes. It was really pretty boring. We got into a section of weather jackets. He started trying some on, and I started just browsing around. I was not all that interested in anything, but then I saw a sleeveless, brown, vest like jacket. Funny thing was that I was already wearing a long sleeve green shirt. Just to take a look, I slipped it on and started to walk to a mirror. My dad saw me, and said "You like sleeveless jackets?" Before I got the guts to tell him what I was doing, he started and gave me a really funny look. He was just mid sentence about some fashion related statement when he stopped and went, "Oh NO you DON'T! I know what you are doing!" I couldn't help but laugh! He was chuckling looking at me standing their in that brown vest. He couldn't believe that I was going to use a clothes shopping trip to try and look Hiccupish, but he was familiar enough with Hiccup's outfit and my personality to figure out what I was up to REALLY quickly! No I did not buy the vest, but it was funny to see that he guessed what I was doing immediately!