Cinematographer Robert McLachlan on creating the look of the Loot Train Attack

It’s nearly a week later, and we’re still bowled over by the epic Loot Train Attack at the end of “The Spoils of War,” the latest episode of Game of Thrones. We’ve had plenty of fun discussing the narrative reasons why it was great, but what about the vast amount of technical know-how behind it? Cinematographer Robert McLachlan, who’s been working on Thrones since season 3 and has lensed episodes like “The Rains of Castamere” and “The Dance of Dragons,” broke it all down for The Verge.

“Any sequence with a great deal of visual effects has to be really carefully planned,” McLachlan said, noting that, unlike the show’s actors, the crew members get the scripts more than a year in advance. (Note to journalists: if you’re trying to find out plot details, talk to the crew members.) “It almost comes down to planning individual frames as you decide how long each shot is going to be, because those shots are insanely expensive, especially if there’s a dragon in the frame. A lot of the creative work for the big action sequences has to be done way in advance. It’s like the way Alfred Hitchcock worked, where he meticulously storyboarded his movies before shooting it, and then he’s been quoted as saying that the filming part was actually the boring bit.”

"And in some ways, it is. The bigger and more dramatic the sequence is, and the more visual effects are involved, the less it’s satisfying for a cinematographer. I thrive on walking into a blank set in the morning, where what ends up in the film is entirely in the cinematographer’s hands. Whereas with this episode’s grand action sequences, with a lot of visual effects, a lot of that work is done almost by committee in advance."

All told, the Loot Train Attack took around 14 months to plan. Naturally, a lot of that planning involved special effects — in case you were wondering, the production didn’t actually hire 5,000 guys to play Dothraki soldiers. They had closer to 50 or 60, and then used crowd replication technology to make the army look much bigger. “We have cameras that can repeat their moves over and over perfectly, exactly the same way each time. So different segments can be blended together…The days of the Russian version of War and Peace, where they physically had thousands of troops on the field, that’s prohibitively expensive now. So we do have real people there, but we duplicate and replicate them. The CG component is just compositing the actual shots we get.”

(FYI: The first time McLachlan worked with crowd replication on Game of Thrones was for the scene where Dany frees the Yunkish slaves in “Mhysa.)”

That remarkable sequence where Bronn stumbles through the battlefield to get to the scorpion also featured plentiful special effects, as could be expected. “We got it in three takes, which is really impressive,” McLachlan said. “But it is an amalgam of, I think, three shots that Joe Bauer’s exceptional VFX team married together, and then significantly enhanced with extra smoke, fire, and embers. It couldn’t be done practically, for safety considerations. Once the serious mayhem begins, very few shots were not helped by the VFX department.”

Of course, not everything was CGI. In fact, the production tried to keep things grounded in reality as often as possible.

"Dave Benioff, in the episode making-of feature, reiterates that the more things we really shoot, the more real it’s going to feel, the less animated and cartoonish it becomes. So that really was 50 guys riding on the backs of their horses, galloping down a hill, while shooting bows and arrows. That’s a lot of training. But if it had just been animated, it wouldn’t have looked as good. It wouldn’t have felt as real, or as visceral."

They tried to keep things like the fire, which is notoriously difficult to fake effectively with special effects, real as often as possible “We had real fires burning all the time, and we shot a lot of fire elements so we could fill shots up with composites, and to give us some better variety than we were physically going to be able to maintain on the really wide shots. On the tighter shots, we’re practical most of the time.”

Turning to the overall look of the show, McLachlan said he wanted to produce a lot of smoke that would block on the sun, both to create a moody atmosphere and to cover for intermittent weather, the latter of which is a huge problem when shooting a sequence for this long. He was inspired both by the paintings of J.M.W. Turner and by forest fires he saw growing up in California. There were problems, though.

"Special-effects smoke is usually white, and it’s quite innocuous. It’s easy to work in. It’s been proven safe to breathe. But we wanted really nasty black smoke that would look evil and horrible, and the only way to do that is to burn diesel oil. The crew and everybody close to the fires were fitted with masks and goggles. But after two days, everybody’s faces were just black, and we were all coughing and wheezing and hacking. The health and safety officer from HBO said, “That’s it! No more of that!” Everybody was relieved, including me on one level, but on the other level, I was going, “Oh man, there goes my smokescreen.”"

Special effects helped clean the final product up and get McLachlan the look he wanted. We daresay it worked out.

Landscapes from Western movies were another obvious influence:

Yep.

Beyond the look of the episode, McLachlan talked about the challenge of creating stakes for the episode. As many critics have noted, this battle was unique in the annals of Game of Thrones action scenes because we’re not really sure who to root for. When he first got the script, McLachlan wondered how to approach that. “Then I realized that the characters actually watching this conflagration, this dragon-induced Armageddon, was going to be a game-changing moment. That wasn’t really specified in the outline of the script. As Jaime’s just taking it in, it’s like somebody watching the A-bomb being dropped. He realizes everything is going to change forever.”

"So we really had to focus on Jaime, and to a lesser extent, Bronn, more than this girl flying around on a dragon, which was technically hard to shoot. So I had this conversation with Matt [Shakman], the director, when we first met, and that’s where we put our focus in the midst of all this mayhem. I felt it wasn’t going to mean anything if we didn’t see it from one specific point of view, which wasn’t really specified in the original outline. And we did that, and I think Nikolaj [Coster-Waldau, who plays Jaime Lannister] delivered one of his best performances in the show so far. I think that’s largely what helped make it work. That, and watching a battle where you’re rooting for both sides. You don’t want to see the dragon get killed, but you don’t want to see Bronn get killed. I think it worked. I’ve gotten emails saying “Best episode ever!” and it’s really gratifying."

Incidentally, “The Spoils of War” has become one of the highest-rated episodes of the show on IMDb, so it seems most of the fans agree with the ones who have been writing McLachlan.

Finally, McLachlan weighed in on what to expect from the final six episodes of the series, set to air sometime next year…or possibly in 2019, gods save us.

"They’re starting to prep the final six episodes now, and I’m sure the pressure for them to outdo themselves will be enormous. My guess is that three of those will probably have some big action setpieces, and the other three will be finishing telling the story. That’s just a guess. I’ve got another episode coming up this week, next Sunday, which interestingly, when I read it and saw the rough cuts — a lot of the visual effects weren’t in yet, and there were a lot of unfinished shots and animatics still in them. But watching the rough cut of the two episodes, it was actually the one from next Sunday that I found most satisfying. So we’ll see!"

For more of McLachlan’s thoughts, head to The Verge.

Next: Valar Morghulis: Who's most likely to die in 'Eastwatch'?

In other news, Inverse has a fascinating interview with Robert Ball, the artist behind HBO’s Beautiful Death series, in which he illustrates a death inspired by each episode of Game of Thrones. Check out the one for “The Spoils of War”:

“The week starts with me watching ‘Game of Thrones,’ usually over breakfast,” Ball said, explaining the process behind behind his work. Fans may be surprised to learn that he watches the episodes as they come out like everyone else — no advance copies for him. “I’ll be there eating my cornflakes while somebody’s being stabbed to death on the television.”

"I usually start out with a pencil, pen or pencil, and a bit of scrap paper. I jot down notes, then I scan those in, draw over them, and then I build shapes in Adobe Illustrator using vectors, which means that I can create big chunks of color immediately and go straight into color rather than linework.Then I get the artwork to a stage that I’m happy with in vector, and port the whole thing over to Photoshop and draw over the top, and mess up those nice, clean, sharp vectors, textures, blood splats."

Ball sends off a sketch to HBO on Monday or Tuesday. After they approve it, he gets to work, and usually has a finished product by Friday.

From the beginning, Ball put a lot of symbolism into his work, and he’s only put in more as the series has gone on and the references to draw from have piled up. “The idea was that you should be able to see these images, and if you haven’t seen the episode they wouldn’t spoil what happens in the episode if you just see them for a split second,” he said.

One of his favorite images was the one he created for season 5’s “High Sparrow,” where Jon Snow executes Janos Slynt. “It mirrored exactly the very first episode with Ned Stark beheading the deserter. What I could do with an illustration was make something explicit that was implicit in the episode.”

"In that illustration I’ve got the back of Jon Snow, but the shadow cast is of Ned Stark, his father, or who he thinks is his father. He’s finally stepped into his shoes, and is ready to become King of the North. Any posters where I can add some meaning or tell a story, that’s very satisfying."

Below, check out a time-lapse video of Ball creating the illustration for “The Spoils of War.”

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