Crew member shows off the virtual set on House of the Dragon

We’re living in an era of TV studios taking big swings. Amazon is sinking hundreds of millions of dollars in a Lord of the Rings show, HBO is mounting a huge follow-up to Game of Thrones, Apple TV+ is adapting Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, and so on.

With so much money being thrown at sci-fi and fantasy projects, studios are looking for anything that can give them an edge. Disney+ came along with one for The Mandalorian: virtual sets. A lot of scenes on that show were shot in a closed set covered with LED screens. In this way, the show can shoot in tons of manufactured alien environments without ever having to leave the studio; it’s expensive, but the effect is convincing and it’s a lot easier than finding 80 different areas around Los Angeles that look like different planets.

Lots of other series have started using this technique, including House of the Dragon, that Game of Thrones follow-up we mentioned a minute ago. Game of Thrones was famous for shooting on location all over the world, and while House of the Dragon will no doubt continue that, they’ll also be able to create places like Oldtown, King’s Landing, Dragonstone and wherever else the series takes us a virtual set.

HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel will use virtual sets

WarnerMedia CEO teased what this looks like in action on House of the Dragon a while back. See how they use one of these virtual sets to create a cave environment:

And now, a crew member on House of the Dragon has shared an image from from the virtual set. Now, the original social media post seems to have been deleted (sharing posts from sets is a no-no), but Reddit still has the pic: click here to see it; we’re not going to embed it on the site lest HBO come for us too.

"First image of the V-Stage being used for HOTD (via @housethedragons on Twitter) from HouseOfTheDragon"

Instead of a cave, now we have an open sky. There are a ton of dragons on this show and we can’t wait to see them flying across that thing.

As for when we’ll see House of the Dragon, the person who originally posted this clip is one of many crew members who have been talking about wrapping up on season 1 lately. We’re in for a lot of post-production so I wouldn’t expect the series to arrive in the next couple months, but at least we can rest easy that it’s coming this year.

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