Director Dean DeBlois kept his camera running throughout the development and production of How to Train Your Dragon 2, and that footage formed the basis of an hour-long film on the eventual US DVD and Blu-ray release. Now, with Oscar voting ongoing, Dreamworks have released the whole thing onto the web. For now at least - expect this to go away when they don't need it any more. It's not an embeddable video but you can see it at the Dreamworks Awards site. There's all sorts of material here, from Jeffrey Katzenberg announcing that the studio will go ahead with the sequel to there being an actual, real movie. Just a minute or so into the film, DeBlois announces that it's April 2010, before heading off to work on the script... coming back, a few seconds later in December. I guess there was nothing he wants to show us from the intervening months, when he would have spent most of his time staring at a computer screen, typing. I think it's a shame that we don't get to hear his thoughts as he wrestles with the story structure and works to flesh out his plot, however. It's not the most glamorous part of the filmmaking process but it is crucially important. Right now, DeBlois will be undergoing the very same series of process on the third film and I'm pretty sure he'll be shooting video again. We're some ways off from getting to share the clips, however - Dragon 3 isn't set for release until June 29th.
Brendon Connelly has been a film writer since the early 90s, with time on the staff of Orbit Magazine, Slashfilm, Bleeding Cool, Den of Geek and many more. He's a long time teacher of film studies and practical filmmaking classes, and has directed music videos, commercials, short films and more. His favourite film is Terry Gilliam's Brazil, his favourite food is pancakes or crepes, and he tries to live his life by the teachings of Kermit the Frog.
