How DreamWorks made 'Dragon 2' movie with the 'absolute pinnacle' of tech (interview)

When you see an animated movie like How to Train Your Dragon 2, you may not think about the technology behind its special effects. But the creators and artists responsible for the movie toiled on it for more than five years to deliver flawless animations that are so lifelike that they don’t catch your attention. You don’t notice small bugs. You just marvel at the realistic water or the emotion in the faces or the shimmering of Hiccup’s leather armor.

But the tech behind the film represents the “absolute pinnacle” of technology and creative media, according to DreamWorks. To make the movie, DreamWorks Animation had to remake its computing infrastructure and create new technologies like Apollo, the platform for making the film, and Premo, a tool that artists could use to build images in real-time. These tools make the artists behind the animations much more efficient, tapping both the infrastructure of multicore computers and cloud computing.