HBO’s visual effects wizards break down their work on “Beyond the Wall”

From fire breathing dragons to undead polar bears, Game of Thrones brings the visual spectacle. “Beyond the Wall,” the Emmy-nominated sixth episode of this most recent season, included 2,106 visual effects shots produced by multiple special effects companies working around the world. A couple of HBO’s heavy-hitter special effects pros talked to IndieWire about how it all came together, starting with that flaming undead polar bear. “In doing photo research on dead polar bears, they lose their fat layer and the fur mats and goes away,” said lead visual effects supervisor Joe Bauer. “They don’t look like polar bears anymore.” Who knew?

So they couldn’t make the polar bear look all the way dead lest we not recognize it. Wayne Stables. an animation supervisor at Weta Digital, had the idea of “sizing up the skeletons, so that there was some explanation for the shape of it. “And you needed to get enough of the familiar facial features so it didn’t look like a monster.”

If you recognize the name Weta Digital, it’s because they’re a famous special studio known for their work on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Avatar, the Avengers movies and a whole lot more. They’re big time, and this was their first time working on Game of Thrones. Per IndieWire, they’ll play “a much bigger role” in season 8. Oh, really?

Anyway, back to the bear, after they had their model, the team had to figure out the best to present it. They went the Jaws route, not letting our heroes get a good look at the bear until it was feet from their faces. “We also used the density of the snow and the air as a way of separating it from the blizzard. We had to play with it a lot to come up with the sweet spot. It’s all a process of exploration. The little nuance of motion that tells you it weighs a thousand pounds, especially when it’s running on snow, is very hard to pull off.”

Beric Dondarrion and his flaming sword helped set the bear off, as lead visual effects producer Steve Kullback explained:

"It also helped visibility quite a bit when he caught fire. And Joe had a [good] technique for supporting that by designing a frame of the polar bear that was built by the special effects team with a head on top and was piped for gas. It gave the stunt team something to interact with."

Of course, the flaming polar bear wasn’t the only special effect in the episode. Spanish studio El Ranchito worked on the army of the dead. There were two kinds of wights onscreen: the green screen wights were made with about 90% CGI and 10% costume and prosthetics. The other kind, the “negative space wights,” were more of a 70-30 split.

“The VFX mainly added volume with thousands of wights on the ice and up into the hill extensions,” Bauer said. “The other addition was when they break through the ice, so we shot plates and 3D tracked them. We built a water tank on stage and used motion control to duplicate camera moves, and shot stunt wights falling through wax pieces on a hydraulic system that lowered them into the tank.”

Eventually, Daenerys flies to Jon’s rescue, blasting a path through the army of the dead in a sequence that required work from no less than five visual effects companies; El Ranchito, The Third Floor, Image Engine, Rhythm & Hues and Pixomondo. “Having Drogon land on the island and then take off from a fixed position was one of the challenges,” said Bauer. “It was like a 200-foot-long high jumper. The complexity of getting all those dynamics correct for the leap and flap took a lot of effort.”

This scene featured multiple actors climbing onto Drogon’s back, another first for the visual effects department. “We decided to laser cut the entire back of Drogon in full scale out of polystyrene, and that was divided into three sections,” Bauer explained.
When they animated the dragon’s performance, we would play back the portion of it where that piece was situated on Drogon so the surface with the actors was correct to the action.”

Finally, there’s Viserion’s resurrection. “When the wights pull Viserion out of the frozen lake onto the surface, that was beautiful work. And so was that iconic blue eye ball shot [from El Ranchito].”

See you soon.

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