CODES AND CONVENTIONS : HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON
date: June 10th, 2021
upload: March 30th, 2022
TOOTHLESS AND LIGHT FURY SCENE
How to train your dragon is an animation based on a children’s book by Cressida Cowell and produced by Dreamworks. The story is about a young Viking teenager expected to follow his tribe’s tradition of becoming a dragon slayer. Still, it somehow becomes friends with Toothless the Night Fury, the rarest dragon in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaf5QD3s_24
This scene comes from the third movie of HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON, presenting you the (potentially) last journey of Hiccup and his dragon Toothless.
The scene I chose is the scene when Toothless and The Light Fury are flying along each other. As it’s one of my favorite scene among the three movies I’ve watched.
MOVIES ANALYSIS
Convention
As the movie is about a journey based on viking mythology. It is mainly an adventure-fantasy movie that made for children/family, means that there’s not much of things that express the action of violence.
Codes
Technical Codes
As the dragons were flying, the scenes are mostly a high-angle shot, showing us the texture of clouds that were drawn. There are a few over the shoulder shots to see both Night Fury and Light fury together in one scene. There’s also a long wide shot which shown both of the characters in the middle so the audience focus on the two dragons only. Many lightning effects were used in the movies because the scene started around the evening and the sky was getting darker and darker. The special effects are also the highlight of the movie as dragons are fantasy creatures, Dreamworks did a really good job in animated dragon’s power/abilites such as spitting fires are more. The song was composed by John Powell like every other movies. Even if there’s not much of an impact made in the song, it helps the dragons carry the scene’s emotion very well. With different dynamics, the audience will hear the packed instruments in a climax/intense moment and the loose instruments in a scene where we’ll be focus on the dragons’ actions.
Written Codes
There’s no written codes needing during this scene as the things that carried this scene were the dragons and the music.
Symbolic Codes
As dragons cannot speak, it is very important to exaggerate their expression. We can tell that Toothless was so happy to meet the Light Fury when his eyes became very wide and made a little growl. We can see a different tone of lights during the scene, the warm tone that comes from the sun in the beginning and the cool tone came from lightning and thunder caused by Toothless and Nature.
