Joe Bauer pulls back the curtain on the special effects of Game of Thrones

You may remember special effects guru Joe Bauer from this year’s Creative Arts Emmy Awards, where he and his team won an Emmy for their work on “Beyond the Wall.” (He also may have let a SPOILER for season 8 slip out). Before the show, Bauer sat down with Huffington Post and revealed some trick of the trade. All that death and destruction on Game of Thrones doesn’t just happen. Learn how it all comes together.

Let’s hit the “death” part first. There’s a reason so many of the death scenes on the show look so memorably realistic: research. “I’ve killed most of the bad guys and even some of the good guys,” Bauer said. “I killed Ramsay with the dogs and Joffrey with poison and had to do profound research on chemical poisonings, and that sort of thing. So all the bloodshot, bugged-out eyes, all of the explosion of blood veins in the skin, the pus liquid coming out, all of that is based on reality.”

I’m suddenly not feeling well, and there’s a lot more to cover. When prepping for the Battle of the Bastards, Bauer and his team had to research how horses look when taking wounds:

"The hardest research to do was for the horses the White Walkers ride, because seeing any injury to an animal is so offensive to watch. With ‘Battle of the Bastards,’ as you might remember, they’re colliding and flipping over and becoming very injured in that sequence, so we had to search out footage of that sort of thing happening to real horses. It really was awful to watch, but it’s part of the job."

Worth it, though.

Keeping with the grimness, Bauer and company looked at the best-known terrorist attack of the past 25 years when putting together the sequence where the Wall comes down:

"Unfortunately, there’s the same old 9/11 footage that’s been researched so many times, but I think that’s pretty much the largest structure anyone’s seen come crashing down, so we had to look at that and see what’s hanging in the air versus all the material that’s crashed and spread onto the ground on both sides. Then we had to figure out how to leave an open space for the army of the dead to walk through, because there would be so much rubble that really it would just be another wall, so we had a lot of it fall into the ocean. It’s just trying to do it in a way that would be physically correct."

As you can imagine, depicting a major catastrophe like that took a lot of careful consideration, both from Bauer and from visual effects company Rodeo FX, which worked on the sequence. It’s all about the little details. “Over the eons, the ocean water would’ve eaten away at the bottom [of the Wall],” Bauer said. “The way the ocean waves crash against it would eat it away. It would freeze, thaw, freeze, thaw.”

"[The Night King and Viserion do] a number of strafing passes to weaken [the Wall], then he concentrates on a single area to cause a structural collapse, like the concept for dropping a big building. You weaken the main part of it, and then the rest of it is sort of a chain reaction. So we established that weak part is close to Eastwatch Castle, and then [with Rodeo], we spent months doing sims to try to get the scale, the weight and the size of it and the right amount of fragmentation."

Speaking of Zombie Viserion, his look changed drastically on the road from conception to final product. Originally, Bauer wanted to model him after the way the dragons look when Tyrion tried to feed them in season 6, after they’d been refusing food: skeletal and emaciated. But showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss rejected this concept, so he turned somewhere else for inspiration: Nosferatu, a 1922 German horror movie about a vampire:

"It’s sort of like a spider with the limbs coiled in and sort of restricted and not very supple in their movements. Very much like a dry spider, is sort of the way I described it. So when you see Viserion flying or attacking, his shoulders are high and then his neck is low. His limbs are drawn in, as if [in] rigor mortis."

Viserion’s father, ladies and gentlemen.

Bauer also was responsible for changing the look of the other dragons when he came on board in season 3. “They are dragons, and they’re not just lizards,” he said. “So you want to give them other capabilities. I was looking at the Maori warriors, and it’s become popular in high schools, where the players will bug the eyes out, stick the tongue out and really look horrifying. I wanted to give that quality also to the dragons when they go into attack mode.”

"We worked really hard with a German company, Pixomondo, who developed that with us, and did exactly that, pushed the teeth forward like a great white shark, bugged the eyes. And then we also extended the fins out, which is something very common in nature, the threat pose."

But vampires and threat stances can only get you so far. While Bauer does a great job of selling the dragons onscreen, we all know they’re not real. In fact, according to Bauer’s dragon design expert, Dan Catcher, the way the dragons are designed, they could never actually fly. “[H]e has a very logical mind about what grows larger, what stays smaller, the physiognomy to hold them aloft,” Bauer said. “He swears a dragon as big as Drogon could never take flight, just because of the mass required to hold him up.”

And there goes the magic and whimsy of Game of Thrones. Dan Catcher sounds like the Neil deGrasse Tyson of the special effects team. In any case, the body mass problem is why we often see Drogon take off from a cliff’s edge, or with a running start, as he does when he and Dany rescue those knuckleheads who went wight-hunting in season 7. “Dan and David had written there were seven characters on his back, so we had a visual reason why it was so difficult, but it adds to the drama.”

Interestingly, we only count six people on Drogon’s back in the scene as finished: Dany, Jorah, Tormund, the Hound, Beric and Mr. Wight. Was Jon originally supposed to escape on Drogon’s back? Or maybe Thoros or Gendry were there in the original script?

Or Bauer misspoke, whichever.

Moving on from dragons, Bauer says that the wight attack in the season 4 finale, “The Children,” was a direct homage to visual effects master Ray Harryhausen, the guy behind the creepy animated skeletons in movies like Jason and the Argonauts, released in 1963. Check out the scenes side by side and see for yourself:

And finally, because you had to know, Bauer confirms that Kit Harington did not use a body double during his love scene with Daenerys in the season 7 finale. So yes, that’s really his ass.

“Kit has a very chiseled body, and as far as I know they never used a body double for him,” Bauer said. You cheeky bastard.

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