Game of Thrones VFX Sets Stunt Record, Tease Season 6
Game of Thrones is often referenced as the largest scale television show in history. One of the major components to that sense of scale lies in the visual effects work that goes into the episodes. Of all the award nominations the show gets, the categories you can always rely on it winning are those for special effects. Season 5 went further in the effects department than the show ever had before with the one-two punch of episode 8 (“Hardhome”) and episode 9 (“The Dance of Dragons”). These episodes were expensive and daunting, as VFX Supervisor Joe Bauer and prosthetic supervisor Barrie Gower told Yahoo TV. Not that they hadn’t done dragon work and zombies before, but it had always been on a much lower scale.
“In Season 3, the dragon was quite small, so as he flapped, he pretty much stayed in one place.” explained Bauer.
But the problem with dragons is how much they grow. For this season, Drogon was designed to be 60 feet wide from wing tip to wing tip. Most of his movements for his big scene in Daznak’s Pit had to be pre-animated, and then a motion controlled computerized rig was programmed to replicate the movements on the ground, with a fifty foot flamethrower rigged up on the end to “breath fire.” Worse, the timing was such that the show only got one shot at filming the stunt. The result was record breaking. “We [accidentally] set the record that had been previously held by Braveheart by burning 21 people in one day. It wasn’t our goal; it just happened to be the case.”
When it came to prosthesis, Gower had his hands just as full. “’We’ll have two, three throat cuts tomorrow,’” says Gower, recalling the shoot with an offhanded cheerfulness. “’This guy’s going to have his head caved in and then we’ve got decapitations on this day and blah blah blah.’ It was a really fun time for our two guys!”
“Hardhome” might not have been a record setter, but was the more difficult of the two episodes to shoot, with Gower estimating that 80% of the team’s work this season went into that episode alone. “On any given day [the shoot for the battle ran for some two weeks], we had about 80 zombies,” says Gower. He goes through some of his favorite creations in the article, including “White Walker X” (the designation of the White Walker Jon Snow battles and kills), Wun Wun the Giant and the Lead Child Wight. The last one of those was a striking image from the episode, and Gower knew they had nailed it, even before the special effects overlay was added in post production.
“We covered him in full facial appliances — a few pieces on his body — and we put green screen patches for his eyes and chunks on his body.” Visual effects removed the chunks, and reduced his body, giving him the skeletal look. “On the day we were really pleased with the result,” says Gower, “but we knew visual effects would take it to another level.”
With Season 5 now over, the question becomes what will they do to top it in Season 6. Buaer and Gower aren’t at liberty to say, but they reminded Yahoo that the dragons still aren’t finished growing, and will “double in size” again by next year.
“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.”
They also teased a scene for Season 6, one that should have been in Season 5, but was shifted to later. Actually, it’s been shifted a couple of times.
[F]or last two years, we got to this one point and we read this one gag and thought ‘Oh my God, how the hell are we going to do that? But this is going to be incredible!’ And then it got pulled and we didn’t do it in Season 4,” says Gower. “And then, lo and behold, in Season 5 there it was again. And it’s pulled again! But now, in Season 6, it looks like we’re going to do it. Fingers crossed they won’t chicken out.”
Whatever could that be? With both Season 4 and 5 including wight battles, it’s a good bet it might refer to something in the Ice realm. But we won’t know for sure until next year—as long as the producers don’t pull it again.
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