For the live-action How to Train Your Dragon, Snapmatic ran one AI photo activation simultaneously in six countries, turning cinema-goers into Vikings using costume references taken straight from the film.
Partners: Allied Global Marketing x Snapmatic
Client: NBCUniversal / DreamWorks
Region: Southeast Asia (India, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand) and Belgium
Launch: June 2025
The challenge: a licensed world, in six markets at once
NBCUniversal and DreamWorks worked with Allied Global Marketing, who brought Snapmatic in to build the activation. The brief was to build fan excitement ahead of the release and drive theatrical attendance, by putting audiences inside the world of Berk. Three things made that harder than a standard booth:
- The likeness had to satisfy a studio. Costumes and Toothless are licensed assets, so the output had to match the film rather than approximate it.
- Six markets ran at the same time, across Southeast Asia and Belgium, each with its own audience and language.
- Guests had to get a result in the moment, with no green screen, no app download and no queue-stalling setup step.
The solution: character transformation from real film assets
We built the experience on our custom image-generation platform, using actual costume references from the film and images of Toothless to develop a set of character transformations. Reproducing a licensed look faithfully is its own discipline, the same one behind getting uniforms and logos right in AI activations, and it is what separates a custom AI theme from a filter.
Guests posed for a photo and had a cinematic portrait moments later, styled into the film's universe. Every output was optimized for sharing, with film-themed overlays and branding. Live gallery URLs let guests reach and share their images straight away, while live printing stations in selected markets put a physical keepsake in their hands.
Building for six markets
Snapmatic and Allied Global Marketing worked closely to keep the activation technically sound and aligned with DreamWorks' creative direction. That covered AI photo-op development with smart background and costume integration, interface and experience design tailored to local audiences, thematic branding and copywriting drawn from the film, and delivery pipelines optimized for high-volume concurrent use. The platform ran all six activations at once, in real time.
Why it worked
The draw was the character, not the technology. Fans already knew exactly what a Berk Viking should look like, so the output had to survive that scrutiny, and working from the film's own costume references is what let it. Keeping the interaction to a single pose meant the queue kept moving in every market, and the gallery link did the rest: guests shared the portrait themselves, without being asked to.
The same center of gravity shows up in other entertainment work. Paramount+'s F1 activation put fans inside a different licensed world, and our AI photo booth runs the same way whether the theme is a film franchise or a race team. What made the Dragon campaign unusual was the footprint: one platform, six countries, one release date.
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