Game of Thrones Season 5 has been one of the most watched television series with over 20 million people. The visual effects team behind the epic saga has been doing amazing work in the background and has been achieving success across the 5 seasons winning awards for the television series year after year.
El Rachito, one of the Spanish VFX studios working on the George R.R Martin saga has released the VFX breakdown of “Hardhorne” sequence where the 998th Lord Commander of Night’s Watch Jon Snow is battling White Walkers and slays them only for them to rise up again and double in number.
The fight sequence where Kit Harrington (Jon Snow) slays a White Walker into pieces or where the giant walks smashing skulls has been a visual spectacle to a point where one cannot imagine the number of frames used to make that one scene.
Visual effects used in Game of Thrones are not limited to crowd multiplication or character modeling you see on the screen. The team to create the life size dragon for the show went on to make “the world’s largest fire-breathing crane.” Drogon, one of the three dragons of Daenerys, has been made using two techniques: one is through the Technodolly, a 15 foot crane which is generally used to move camera. But instead of camera the team attached a flamethrower on it to replicate the fire breathing reptilian. His physical traits were modeled after real animals: Komodo dragons, iguanas, horned lizards, and crocodiles. His movements were derived from eagles and bats, and his takeoff from pelicans.
The other new method employed was the SimulCam system, where the appearance of the dragon was saved into the camera so that everyone looking at the monitor could see exactly where he would be, and the scene could be framed properly. Tennis ball puppet was used extensively where the tennis ball stuck on a stick was used to help actors be it the dragon or the huge “Giant”.
Game of Thrones has redefined the use of visual effects on television and the budgets allotted to the CGI teams sometimes would put a feature film to shame. Be it the “Battle of Blackwater”, “Khaleesi’s Dragons” or the grandeur of “Braavos“, David Benioff and D.B Weiss series has delivered the product which has been top class and never let the fans down when it comes to the experience of the seven kingdoms.