Composing the visual effects of Game of Thrones

It should come as no surprise that there are Emmy winners among Game of Thrones’ visual effects crew. After all, the team is tasked with bringing the fantasy world of Westeros to life year after year, a daunting task when the dragons and the battles both continue to grow in scale. VFX superviser Joe Bauer and prosthetics superviser Barrie Gower were recently interviewed by Yahoo!’s Robert Chan about the challenges Season 5 presented in terms of special effects.

Unsurprisingly, the most challenging part of this season was the battle at Hardhome, which took about two weeks to film. Rendering Wun Wun the giant took a chunk of extra time, in part because the actor (Ian Whyte, who is in fact a whopping 7’1″) was filmed on a green screen in Belfast. As such, the scene where Wun Wun busts out of the longhouse took a couple of days by itself, as the team had to destroy the longhouse separately and then combine that with Ian Whyte’s performance. That creepy skeletal child wight was also mostly special effects, with green screen reducing his body to give him the appearance of a small, bony boy.

The highlight for the team, though, was the Drogon scene in “The Dance of Dragons.” In the course of filming Drogon’s fiery rage, the team “accidentally” beat out Braveheart‘s record for most people burned in one day, though they also managed to get the shot in one take with only “one small blister on a pinkie” worth of injuries. The dragons continue to be the biggest challenge for the VFX crew, as they grow every year. Drogon himself had to be pre-animated while he was represented on-set by a motion-control rig with a fifty-foot(!) flamethrower. As for Dany’s flight, Emilia Clarke was placed on what is essentially a giant mechanical bull (a “buck” attached to a hydraulic rig).

Barrie Gower also told Yahoo! that next season will be even more impressive and complex. “Between Season 3 and Season 5, our shot count doubled,” he says, and of course, the dragons will double in size once again:

When the dragons were small, we had little foam rubber models of each dragon and we could carry them on and off of the set and it was no big deal. Last year, the best we could do was a head and this year it’s going to be a finger nail or something, I’m not really sure.

Most intriguingly, Gower also touches on a rather cryptic special effects scene that was originally slated for Season 4, then pulled and placed in Season 5, then pulled again. Hmm, this couldn’t POSSIBLY be [spoiler]Lady Stoneheart[/spoiler], right? Whatever it is, the shot has been set for Season 6, and Gower is hopeful that audiences will finally get to see it.

• Published on 06/14/2015 at 4:00 PM CDT
• Last updated on 06/14/2015 at 4:00 PM CDT