Upcoming Game of Thrones action sequences “outstrip the Battle of the Bastards”

Game of Thrones is a landmark television show for many reasons, including that its special effects are more advanced than any show in history. As proof, I’ll just put up a clip from the Loot Train Attack in season 7:

You won’t see that on The Big Bang Theory.

This is all the more remarkable because David Benioff and Dan Weiss, the showrunners, weren’t known for their special effects acumen when they took the job. As they told The Hollywood Reporter in a joint interview, they learned on set with the help of special effects gurus like Steve Kullback and Joe Bauer, the unsung heroes of the show’s splendid visuals. And they’re still learning. “As far as comfort with the process goes, we love it precisely because we know we’ll never get ‘comfortable’ with it in the way you’re comfortable with something you know inside and out,” Benioff and Weiss said through email. “It’s too deep a pool to ever reach the bottom, and the pool keeps getting deeper and wider every year as innovation continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible. You’re constantly learning, which is what keeps it fresh.”

"In the first season, the earliest challenges involved learning how to do a lot with a little. The show did not have tremendous resources to burn for VFX back then. We still remember the 4-hour-plus meetings where we’d go through the whole season, scene by scene, and count every set extension, every wire removal shot, look at every VFX blood hit to see if it could be done practically and save us a few hundred bucks. And then we’d do it all over again a few weeks later, so we could make the budget a number that was not going to grow. That was a very valuable experience, because it forced us to engage with the details of the process and not take the attitude, ‘Well, these VFX guys are very smart, they’ll figure it out.’ Because no matter how much your resources increase, that way of thinking leads to a tremendous waste of time and money. Which in turn leads to things not looking and feeling the way they should."

Ah, how far they’ve come:

Although there’s plenty of room for debate, I think a lot of fans would say that the Battle of the Bastards is the show’s current high watermark for action filmmaking. “That one also needed to look as realistic as possible,” Benioff and Weiss remember. “The horses colliding with each other needed to look the same, even though one was real and another was CG. The armies needed to seem real, messy, and of a piece, even when three-quarters of the people in frame were either crowd replications or fully digital.”

Benioff and Weiss remember the battle of the icy lake in season 7 as another complicated sequence. “Of course, the things we’re doing for the final season go a good deal beyond either of those.”

"In terms of sheer scope, there is a lot in this season that outstrips the “Battle of the Bastards” sequence so expertly directed by Miguel Sapochnik. We can say this without feeling bad, since most of it was also expertly directed by Miguel Sapochnik."

Miguel Sapochnik, is also behind “Hardhome,” FYI, another action high point for the show. He’s directing two of the six final episodes, and it sounds like he’s up to his old tricks. We are beyond ready.

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We know season 8 will have at least one spectacular battle sequence; plenty of cast and crew members have hinted at something amazing coming round the corner. Benioff and Weiss didn’t give details, but they do praise the hardworking professionals on the effects team, which could give us some clues:

"Paul Hatchman, our key VFX grip, and his team have erected mammoth green screens, hundreds of feet long and over a hundred feet high, because they were necessary to shoot some of the larger-scale battle sequences. As the dragons have gotten larger, the process of tracking their movements for the actors and directors has gotten more complicated and recently moved over to simulcast technology, where pre-animated versions of the dragons are superimposed upon the actors and sets in real time. That way we can see what we’re actually shooting while we’re shooting it instead of having to figure out a way to shoehorn things together later."

We know of at least one massive green screen the crew built for season 8. You can read more about it here, but beware SPOILERS. For now, it suffices to say that the Game of Thrones team really has pulled out all the stops for the final episodes.

“On a practical level, [shooting season 8] was pretty intense,” Benioff and Weiss continued. “To make the agreed-upon date involved a tremendous amount of scheduling intelligence on the part of [producers] Bernie Caulfield and Chris Newman, and a tremendous amount of ingenuity from [visual effects producers] Steve Kullback and Joe Bauer — and Stefen Fangmeier and Jeff Schaper, whom Joe and Steve brought in to help supervise the large quantities of simultaneous VFX work that no one person could possibly supervise on his own.”

"We always knew this had to be a story that ended when it was time for it to end, and not one that got dragged out until it had worn out its welcome. We knew this moment was coming, but it’s still impossible to prepare yourself fully for it. We’re dealing with it piecemeal as we finish up the season. We’re also in a tremendous amount of denial. Six months from now, you’ll probably find us both wandering down Sunset Boulevard in our Game of Thrones crew jackets, wearing headphones, muttering notes to an assistant director who isn’t there."

Maybe. But before that, we feast. The final season of Game of Thrones kicks off on April 14. You can read of Benioff and Weiss’ comments here.

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