DreamWorks CTO Lincoln Wallen went to the company’s artists, asking them to daydream what kind of tools they would like to use in a perfect world. "I recall it very well," Simon Otto, head of character animation for Dragon 2, tells me in a suite at the studio’s Glendale headquarters. "One of the first things was, "[What] if you just forget everything you’re doing today?" People with backgrounds in all different types of animation were consulted — from 2D animation, to stop-motion, to video games — in an effort to create a software solution that could bring together the best of all possible worlds. "We created a big list of why certain mediums have advantages over others," he says. That list provided big-picture guidance for the software team as it began building and iterating on a new animation tool for DreamWorks — and the end result is named Premo.

The differences between the two programs are obvious at first glance. Rather than forcing animators to deal with rough approximations or partial versions of characters, Premo allows them to work with the fully realized and skinned characters, which they can interact with and modify in real time. Camera positions can be moved on the fly to get a better vantage point of a particular movement, and thanks to robust support for the latest multi-core processors there’s enough power to put as many different characters in a shot as the director wants (some of the sequences in Dragon 2 feature dozens of different dragons flying around simultaneously). Rendering is still a requirement, of course, but Premo does it all in the background without tieing the app up and preventing additional work. Otto showed me a demo of the software on a machine with 16 cores — quadrupling what you’d find in the base-level Mac Pro — and the moment he tweaked a character’s position the sequence re-rendered seamlessly without even the mildest hiccup.