Animating Daenerys’ villainous turn “weighed heavily” on SFX artists

The final season of Game of Thrones is nominated for an Emmy award Outstanding Special Visual Effects — specifically, lead VFX supervisor Joe Bauer and his team are up for their work on “The Bells,” and there’s just no way they don’t win. I mean, how in the hell is anything beating this?

Bauer’s goal with this sequence was to keep things as photo-realistic as possible, so we felt the full impact of what was happening. “Making it all seem real was a tall task, and an honor to finally achieve [on this scale],” he told Indiewire. I daresay he succeeded, but making it happen was grueling work.

For one thing, capturing the destruction of King’s Landing required building a massive set, where before the team had always shot on locations in cities like Dubrovnik or Girona. “[W]e had never before been required to so thoroughly create the Westerosi city, nor had any practical set been built with such immense complexity, nothing short of capturing in 3D scans nearly all of Old Town Dubrovnik would suffice as a starting point,” said Bauer.

Essentially, they built a city just so they could blow it up. Although the set stands still, in preparation for a time when it can be visited by tourists:

On the digital side of things, Scanline VFX worked as the main special effects studio on the episode. “At its core, King’s Landing was based on modular building assets similar to Lego building blocks,” said Scanline VFX supervisor Mohsen Mousavi. “We took the technology we developed years ago for the creation of the digital San Francisco in the film San Andreas and pushed it to the next level for Season 8. We were able to build many intact and damaged assets, which were efficient enough to sync with the Dubrovnik style of architecture, but at the same time, were engineered carefully to work in our simulation pipeline.”

"We needed to rework most of the assets to make it technically sound for various destruction scenarios. We started very early on using the blocking animation, which gave us a clear indication of the timing and the layout of when and where the dragon fire would hit…The tricky part was to make the fire extremely forceful but staying away from the wrecking ball look.We represented the fire as an extreme passive force, which instantly push everything out of the way and vaporized to fire and ashes. For the scene when the dragon blows up the King’s Landing gate, the production built a third scale miniature of the gate and blew it up, but, unfortunately, it did not have a big enough fireball to tell the story. It was shot from five different angles, it looked great, but they wanted more of a fiery event. So they gave us the challenge to almost recreate that digitally. It turned out as one of the most immensely complex digital pyro-shots of the series. We came up with one simulation that could be used in all the angles consistently similar to the original idea of the third scale miniature."

I think it turned out okay:

Of course, it’s not all about technical wizardry. Bauer was also mindful that the special effects had to help tell a story, one the show had been building towards for a long time. “So, after seven years of building out the physical and sometimes emotional world of Thrones through use of visual effects, in “The Bells,” it was time to add an exclamation point,” he said. “Our brains registered a level of shock when reading the script pages. Now our world building methods would be used to un-build, to de-construct.”

"Unleashing the full, almost Godzilla-like force of Drogon on a rampage was a thrill, but what it meant weighed heavily on us: Dany would never again represent hope for a better world. Finally she could not escape her own blood line. Heavy stuff."

The heaviest.

The Primetime Emmy awards will air on Fox on September 22. The special effects Emmys will actually be given out earlier at the Creative Arts Emmys on September 14 and 15. We’ll just go ahead and congratulate Bauer and company now, to beat the rush.

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