Game of Thrones crew members tease season 8: “Everything goes to sh—”

The Game of Thrones cast members get all the attention, but this show doesn’t happen with the incredibly dedicated crew members. From building the sets to choreographing the fights to arranging shoots in beautiful locations, these professionals work tirelessly behind the scenes to make sure Game of Thrones is the biggest, baddest, most impressive show on TV.

There are tons of moving parts on a show as complicated as Game of Thrones, but one of the most noticeable is the special effects. “It all starts with opening a script and reading, ‘There are giants riding mammoths’ or ‘Dany climbs on Drogon and they roar off to safety,’” visual effects producer Steve Kullback told Entertainment Weekly. “You close the script and go, ‘Holy hell, how are we going to do that?’”

Basically, they work their butts off until it all comes true. “The bible for our methodology is to work with as much photography as we can,” Kullback said. “Then any CG added in has to be dialed in to look like the photography. It makes the visual effects not bump against the rest of production.” For example, for the ambush at Daznak’s Pit in season 5…

"We needed to have a dragon blasting fire at 20 Harpies and light them all up at once. We were kicking around ideas, and [VFX supervisor Joe Bauer] says, ‘Well, it’s clear that we need to do it for real.’"

And then they just, like…did. “We animated the crane to match the movement of the dragon, then set fire to the stunt guys. Twenty-two was the new record for people ignited all at one time. Thank God no one has gotten hurt.”

I think I speak for most Game of Thrones fans when I saw I appreciate that these guys keep things as real as possible, even if it’s a lot more potentially dangerous than using CGI. “You have the best people working on those fire stunts, but it’s still nerve-racking,” said Bauer. “But all of the departments are so top-notch that if anybody was in my position and said, ‘We’ll just do it all CG,’ they’d be making a huge mistake.” Truth.

Kullback and Bauer also talked about how the dragons have evolved over the years. “Up until season 7 they doubled in size every year, but they would’ve become Godzilla if they’d doubled again for 8, so we decided that was enough,” Bauer said. “We have to think about what these creatures would need in battle just as much as how to make them beautiful.”

"When Viserion gets the spear through him and crashes and dies, it was really gratifying how shocked and sad people were. It’s rare for CG characters to register on an emotional level without spectacle and gore."

And they’re not just involved in killing off CGI characters. There were special effects used, for example, in the death of Joffrey Baratheon, who’s face had to turn a freaky shade of purple. Doing research for the Battle of the Bastards was particularly difficult. “We needed horses to really get damaged, broken legs, etc. — so inevitably you have to watch horse races where the horse goes down and over, head first,” said Bauer. “Some of the research is so graphic that we have to put a warning on it.”

Naturally, Bauer tells us that season 8 will double everything we’ve seen before. Kullback: “A good way to characterize this season is, everything goes to sh—.”

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Meanwhile, Game of Thrones production designer Deborah Riley and and executive producer Bernie Caulfield gave a talk at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. Fansite Watchers on the Wall was there and related lots of fun behind-the-scenes tidbits, such as:

• Apart from Euron’s Silence, there’s been one ship prop that’s stood in for every boat on the show since the first season. The crew always alters it for what the scene demands.
• Every year, Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss give Riley’s team an outline detailing what sets the new season will need. According to Caulfield, the outlines are “surprisingly funny,” which is also something we’ve heard about their set directions in scripts. “We lived for [Benioff and Weiss’ approval,” Caulfield said. “They have their own vision and choose where to go with it.”
• When working on the Battle of the Bastards, their reference image was Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica, about the horror and brutality of the Spanish Civil War.

As for the end of the series, Riley said she “cried her eyes out” when it was over. “It will never get better than this,” Caulfield said, and I can’t say I think she’s wrong. Riley and Caulfield also had some interesting things to say about the legion of shows — Amazon’s Lord of the Rings, Netflix’s The Witcher, etc — that are trying to follow in Game of Thrones’ footsteps, noting that Thrones grew slowly over time to become the behemoth that it is, while these new shows are trying to be huge right out of the gate. I’m definitely interested in seeing how that all shakes out in the future.

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