See the special effects reel for the Battle of Meereen

There’s a lot of special effects work that goes into creating a season of Game of Thrones, a fact that becomes more true as the show gets ever more visually ambitious. This year, we’ve already seen special effects reels from companies like Iloura, which did the FX work on the Winterfell portion of “Battle of the Bastards,” and Mackevision, which did work in King’s Landing, the Iron Islands, and that final shot of Daenerys’ armada setting out for Westeros. Now, we bring you a special effects reel from Rodeo FX, which did work on several Dothraki scenes, Theon and Yara’s stopover in Volantis, and the Meereen portion of “Battle of the Bastards.” Watch and go “whoa.”

Game Of Thrones – Season 6 – VFX Breakdown from Rodeo FX on Vimeo.

Rodeo FX has already won two Emmys for its work on the show, for Seasons 4 and 5, and is nominated for its work on Season 6. Digital Arts has an article on how the studio achieved some of these remarkable effects. For example, Rodeo had to pay special attention to the lighting in Volantis. In Season 5, we saw the city in the daytime, but in “The Broken Man,” Theon and Yara were hanging out there at dusk. According to Game of Thrones production VFX supervisor Joe Bauer, Volantis “lives and dies by the lighting,” so you can be sure Rodeo took care to get it right.

It goes without saying that the most complicated sequence Rodeo worked on was the Battle of Meereen. “The destruction of the ships was a huge undertaking as we had to model a completely different version of our asset for this scene,” said Rodeo FX president Sebastien Moreau. All in all, the studio worked on 65 special effects shots in “Battle of the Bastards.”

Meanwhile, IndieWire talked to Bauer about Mackevision’s special effects work on the Jon Snow-Ramsay Bolton smackdown in the same episode. Here’s that special effects reel:

According to Bauer, episode director Miguel Sapochnik looked to Akira Kurosawa’s classic Ran as inspiration for the action. (See a clip from the movie below.) “There were various other western and historic battle movies and other references that informed army formation and tactics,” he said. “The body pile concept came from both Roman and Civil War accounts. Aesthetically, the feel for Bastards was to stay with Jon Snow and keep the viewer inside the action relentlessly.”

As you can imagine, capturing the complicated action of the battle took some doing. “During the 25-day shoot in open Northern Ireland field, we positioned a number of ‘witness cameras’ around the battlefield in order to capture multiple vantage points of movement of the live horses,” Bauer said.

"In addition, the thousands of CG horses kicked up mountains of digital dirt and mud, bled buckets of digital blood, and contributed volume and pathos to the body pile"

Wun Wun, who Bauer says “represents the end of the race of Giants,” posed an especial challenge. “His integration required digital support, such as integration with the photographed location terrain (mud, dead grass, crushed bodies), as well as hand offs with wire stunts, and with digital doubles, including a fully CG horse and rider, which Wun Wun clobbers in a dramatic moment.”

Best of luck to Rodeo FX at this year’s Emmy awards.