President Barack Obama went to DreamWorks Animation studios in Glendale yesterday where he discussed the economy of the United States. After his speech, he got an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the studio. Also journalists went inside the studio and they got some exclusive looks at DreamWorks’ upcoming projects How To Train Your Dragon 2 and Home.

While Barack Obama visited DreamWorks Animation today, a group of visual-effects artists went to a south Californian park to protest against unfair treatment and wages. Speaking to Deadline, anonymous protest organizer “VFX Soldier” clarified that the protest was not intended to “embarrass DreamWorks Animation,” but instead planned to raise awareness of the “the absolute collapse of VFX employment.

The first video contains footage of Obama with Jeffrey Katzenberg and  How to Train Your Dragon 2 director Dean DeBlois. Dean shows the president a scene from the movie and they demonstrate motion-capture technique with characters from the movie. (So they used motion capture in HTTYD2?) In the background you can see the scene and some posters from the film.

 

 

The president also got an exclusive look at Home, the third DreamWorks film that will release in 2014. Jim Parsons and Steve Martin, voice actors in Home, showed the president how voice acting works through a demonstration. Some final character designs of the characters can be seen on the screen above president Obama.

Home tells the story of an overly optimistic alien race named Boov, and its leader, Captain Smek, invades Earth to hide from their mortal enemy and make it a new home. Convinced they are doing a favour, they begin to relocate the human race but one resourceful girl, Tip, manages to avoid capture. When on the run, she is accompanied with a banished Boov, named Oh, who accidentally notified the enemies of his whereabouts. The logo treatment and characters were leaked a few months ago, but DreamWorks pulled them down. This is now the first official look at the project.

I loved seeing more of these films. I’m not very excited for Home. Personally, I don’t like the character designs of the aliens and the story doesn’t seem interesting enough to me. I am interested in How to Train Your Dragon 2 and this footage looked once again really good, so I can’t wait to get the first trailer hopefully soon. I don’t understand why they didn’t show anything of Mr. Peabody and Sherman. It’s the first DreamWorks film that will release in 2014, so they could have shown Obama something from it to at least promote it further. But Rob Minkoff is in London to record the score, so that’s probably the reason why it was left off the docket.

Source: The Verge

What do you think of this new footage from upcoming DreamWorks projects?