Here’s how Image Engine brought Drogon to life
Drogon has long been the biggest and more fearsome of Daenerys Targaryen’s dragons, to the point where there was a whole team — Image Engine — dedicated to animating him in season 7. Image Engine’s visual effects supervisor, Thomas Schelesny, talked to Den of Geek about how he and his team were able to bring Drogon to life for some of the complicated sequences from the past seven episodes.
First of all, it’s important to note that Schelesny and company had plenty of help from the first-rate stunt crew. “They did some of the biggest stunt burns in history with 30, 40 men all at once, exploding in fire…and they were all thrashing their arms around and acting,” Schelesny said. “Then very quickly afterwards people would rush in and put them out, but a lot of that stuff was practical.” The SFX teams and stunt teams work together, sometimes in ways that must look pretty funny to the casual observer:
"You might fly the drone past and say, ‘Everyone, look at the drone! That’s a giant dragon!’ Or you might have somebody running around on the ground with a pole and a tennis ball on the top. ‘Look at that! That’s the dragon’s head, and it’s coming right towards you!’ And you react to it as it approaches you because it’s going to kill you. But you have to give everyone a central point to look because if they don’t and they’re looking all over the place, the shot becomes almost impossible because you don’t really know where to put the character then."
Where do I apply to be guy who runs around an open field with a tennis ball on a stick yelling about dragons?
But filming something like the Loot Train Attack takes more than that one lucky guy. In addition to knowing where the dragon is, the extras also have to know where his flames are. Getting it right takes careful planning.
"When Drogon would take a deep breath and blow fire, that fire was also shot practically on a stage, and the motion of that flame moving back and forth, left and right, had to be in very good sync with how our digital character was moving. The trick is that we animated everything before it was shot. We animated the dragon before the backgrounds were shot; we animated the dragon before the actors were filmed or the fire was filmed. After we had that first pass of animation completed, everything else that was shot in real life was shot to match the dragon."
Schelesny also needed to combine the practical and the digital when rendering image of Daenerys Targaryen riding Drogon into battle. “[I]t was very rare that you would see a digital version of Daenerys,” Schelesny explained. “You’d almost always see a green screen photograph version of her because again, it just looks more real.”
"They had the actress sitting on a green screen, a robot controlled base that she would sit on that looked like the dragon’s back, and that was pre-programmed to bank left and right and move up and down in perfect sync with our animation."
Schelesny has a long history with Game of Thrones, having previously worked on the White Walker scenes in season 4. But he’s particularly proud of the Loot Train Attack. “My personal feeling is it is possibly the best-directed action sequence that I’ve seen on the series,” he said.
“It really brought the audience along for a wonderful ride… It was well laid out, beautifully shot, and you see the ebb and the flow of the battle. And that’s entirely in the hands of [director Matt Shakman].”
Matt Shakman isn’t returning for season 8, but we’re holding out hope that Schelesny is, and that he can live up to his impressive reputation. You can listen to his full interview above.
Next: Game of Thrones is casting a pair of new characters for season 8
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