How to Train Your Dragon is a MASTERCLASS in Theme Writing

Today I want to talk about the work of composer John Powell, more specifically his work on How to Train Your Dragon, which is now over a decade old and still considered one of Dreamworks' best films if you're not familiar with John Powell, he has been involved in the scores of several films such as Ant Chicken Run and Shrek; However, this was the first Dreamworks Animations film where he was at the helm of the entire score and what we are in for is a full score that is pure thematic brilliance. We're going to take a look at some of the harmonic devices that John Powell used to take some of these

theme

s and convert them for various applications throughout the film, but for an even deeper look at how these

theme

s are used, particularly in relation With the story, I want to point you to a video by Phoebe Kate that came out a little over four years ago and she did an absolutely brilliant job of explaining how these themes are interwoven into the story and how they relate to the film itself very quickly before moving on. .

If you want to support the channel, the best way to do so is to take advantage of our 30 off using the music theory code 30 and go and watch the introductory piano course. There is a link in the description. Check it out, let's move on. We are going to listen to the first of our two themes and this is Hiccup's theme, so from the beginning we introduce this theme that will follow us throughout the movie, it seems like we keep coming back to this, especially when we talk about movies. but we use a pedal tone and once again a pedal tone is simply a bass note that is sustained even though things above may be changing, so as we see here we are in F major and the melody just uses it and floats around this. diatonic one four five one is really simple at its base, it's really establishing a baseline here and it feels like as we develop the harmony around it it feels like we're getting ready to go on an epic journey, I mean it feels like try to develop especially that. now fundamentally there's nothing different about that other than basically an inversion and the melody goes to the next kind of place up here it's slowly shaking is like this this pedal tone makes all of this feel good we're chewing on this for a brief moment and establishing that okay, something we're getting ready to go here now we've established a new key and this brings up the second part of Hiccup's theme which ends up being used later in some pretty epic moments and which goes like this Now, this is what It is so interesting about these topics, as bbk points out in his video.

This particular theme appears 31 times in the film. This is a great demonstration of the brilliance of thematic

writing

and film scores and we have seen it in many scores. In the past, for decades, this is how film composers have created themes that make you subconsciously remember parts of movies and, in the end, can help tie a movie together. How to Train Your Dragon is perhaps one of the best examples of this because of the hiccups thing. it is used as phoebe kate says 31 times throughout the movie and is eventually combined with the other half which is Toothless' theme, i.e. it is not really a theme in itself as if it were a complete piece, but more well a motif that again is used in so many different contexts, listen to the beginning of the fallen

dragon

, look at this, one use of the theme is clearly important and the other use of the theme is clearly minor and because it was slowed down so much, it would almost.

I don't even realize it's the same theme unless you're listening to it, but what it does is it subconsciously tells

your

ear oh yeah, yeah, yeah, no, this sounds familiar, I understand it's about Toothless, I want you to notice something else. about this because it is not simply a matter of taking a theme that is in a major key and now converting it to a minor key. The first example I gave, that melody starts on the right root, but when we put it in a minor context, listen. to this listen where that first note was look it's not even the same melody in a minor key it's a different melody now it starts on the third the minor third but we still realize it's the same because it's the same melody, even if it applies totally differently, the first in major starts on the root and the second in minor starts on the minor third, it's a fantastic way to create what is essentially the same theme but applied in such a different way that it can create this feeling completely different even if we still understand on some level what it is being applied to, we can see this exact same method applied to Hiccup's topic and at the beginning we established that it was a great encouragement, it felt very similar to us.

We were about to embark on an epic journey, but we were hopeful that it would be very positive, but we can take that too and turn it into something that is not heard, which we didn't even make it minor, it has a lot more to do with the surrounding chords that we use because if you look at this, it's a major chord, but somehow it sounds very mysterious, a sinister and potentially negative feeling, potentially minor, but it's major, it's just a major triad which, if you remember at the beginning, is exactly what it starts with . However, look at this second chord instead of if this were just the original theme.

Okay, let's play the original theme in the key of D so that the first chord is exactly the same. However, what is this our second chord? Now we are playing. With this triad of pedal tones it's fine and one of the really cool things about using a pedal tone is that it frees you up to play with the harmony on top and maybe with the right hand or maybe with the other parts of the orchestra, whatever. that you're

writing

it, but look at how it sounds when we start playing with triads, you can get some really mysterious and spooky sounds from that and that's what we're doing here instead of giving us this positive four chord over the pedal. now it's a flat two chord that creates this scale that we're using, it's actually the fifth mode of the harmonic minor scale, which is d the fifth of well, d is the fifth of is the fifth of g, so yeah we take a harmonic of G game minor than from d we obtain that, which is what we call the Phrygian dominance scale very close to the Phrygian, but instead of that minor third we replace it with a major third creating the dominant chord within the scale , therefore Phrygian dominant, so when we play with that form, we can understand that it's a really ambiguous sound, in some ways, a little bit sinister, it's not really a minor because it's just a major chord and that's how we hear it applied here, but the use of that dominant Phrygian sound, especially that e flat over d which creates a really oh boy, what's going to happen here and is a brilliant use of the theme in a completely different context where we still recognize what it is, we can hear it even if it is subconscious, but it is applied in a different way that gives us a totally different feeling, so these two themes are developed and used in many different contexts throughout the film and again, thanks to Phoebe's in-depth analysis Kate, we know that Hiccup's theme is used 31 times and toothless.

The theme is used 28 times, all of these are maybe applied a little differently, maybe the harmony is changed a little to give us a slightly different feel depending on what is happening in the story and of course they culminate in a Driving test. Moment in the story when the characters of Hiccup and Toothless finally discover how to work together and how to become one. It may be one of the most epic moments in any movie, so we're setting this d as a base. Now here's the topic of Toothless. Okay buddy, let's take this nice and slow, here we go, here we go, position three, not four, now we have Hiccup's theme, part two of Hiccup's theme, yeah, it works well, oh, this is it amazing, now look at this, here we go.

It's going to crash and suddenly the harmony, all the themes disappear, the harmony becomes something totally ambiguous, we don't know what's happening, but it's chaos, right, and that's what we hear, strings, strings, and then we recover our d. but now we're playing with this triadic motion that we were talking about before, so we went from checking it to using this pedal tone and we're just playing with a lot of different triads that create dissonance on top of that. root to create this chaotic ration move and then we start hooking again and here we go ready not just oh my gosh okay there's a couple of things going on here first of all we've done all of this so far in d and at the moment where we regain control, we've transposed a whole step and we're on e and we're back to Toothless's theme, so what a brilliant combination of those two themes together, but it goes even deeper and I want you to do it.

Check this out because there's a really amazing reflection on how that change happened when we jump from Toothless's theme to Hiccup's theme and back and forth we see different things happening on the screen and I think it's really really amazing how these two work together, check this out, so throughout this part of the scene, Hiccup focuses a lot on his control using the foot actuator for the fin. Yes, it worked well. Yes, it worked. It's that he's controlling this thing and he's saying. I need to do this and get there. He hasn't made it yet. They are crashing into rocks.

They are doing this kind of thing well. It's not perfect yet. And we're still listening to Hiccup's theme. He is the one. Who is trying to be in control here? Yeah, yeah, I'm in position four, I'm still changing all the positions, trying to say, "Okay, let's do this, let's do this" and eventually that leads to falling. This is all supported by having his cheat sheet for fin position while he has control of that fin, we hear his theme, they are falling and he finally re-engages now check this out here, toothless gets into this air brake now we listen to the toothless theme until finally hiccup throws away the cheat sheet and says you know what i need to trust this animal, we have to work together here forget the cheat sheet, let's do this together and that's where we have this amazing moment, Come on, this entire movie is a master class in thematic writing and John Powell absolutely crushed it.

I mean, I think this is one of the most beloved Dreamworks scores of all time and we can learn a lot about thematic and cinematic writing from these examples and if you don't feel like it. You're not at that point yet to understand exactly what we're talking about with this whole harmony thing, so you might want to start by just picking up this instrument and learning to play the piano, and that's why we created The Introductory Piano Course It's the best way to go from never having played this instrument before to getting a set of tools that you can develop and eventually play whatever you want, even play along with it. with stuff like this, it's available for 30 off using music theory code 30.

There's a link down in the description and it's the best way to support the channel because the reality is that most of the things we talk about They are claimed, so no. You can only take advantage of the incredibly easy to follow and clearly explained piano course that we have available, but you are also supporting the channel in the process and I really appreciate that it allows us to continue doing what we love to do, which is We provide you with content, so if you have opportunity, check the link in the description. Thanks for watching this video, let me know what you thought of this score in the comments below and if there are any other scores you would like me to cover. the future thanks for watching this video and see you in the next one