So, finally Valka is calling in the big guns, The Bewilderbeast. Now when I was boarding this there were absolutely no designs for him. The only description I got was that Bewilderbeast should be bigger than the dragon Hiccup and Toothless defeated at the end of the first movie, he has huge tusks and long dreadlocks-like fur. Well, I just decided to keep him kind of this huge generic shape because I had a zillion other character centric aspects to work out, so I figured a nondescript placeholder giant dragon was fine until the design was approved. I just made sure that the shots/compositions for his reveal were super cool and cinematic. My favorite shot is the where Valka's face in super close-up takes up half the screen and in the other half you see something huge rising up out of the water toward camera.
That was actually inspired by this selfie taken in the gardens of Versailles when we were on vacation just a few weeks earlier.
