How House of the Dragon put together the dragon fight scene over Storm’s End
By Daniel Roman
House of the Dragon season 1 is at an end, and we’re still hearing about how the show managed to pull of its impressive dragon scenes. The original Game of Thrones show raised the bar in terms of what was possible for dragons on television, and House of the Dragon was determined to outdo its predecessor. Which is fair, really; a show called House of the Dragon should probably have some impressive dragons in it. Season 1 featured quite a lot. Viewers got to know around nine of them over the course of the season and caught glimpses of a few others.
The most epic dragon sequence on the series to date is the climactic clash over Storm’s End between the aging dragon Vhagar, ridden by Aemond Targaryen; and the much younger Arrax, ridden by Lucerys Velaryon. This was always going to be a huge moment; in George R.R. Martin’s novel Fire & Blood, the death of Lucerys over Storm’s End is what really kicks ofs the Dance of the Dragons civil war.
But how exactly did the series manage to pull off this scene? Let’s go behind the scenes!
How House of the Dragon used technology from The Mandalorian to create Storm’s End
When it comes to dragon-riding, House of the Dragon has one major tool that Game of Thrones didn’t: the Volume. Created by Lucasfilm subsidiary Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) for the Disney+ series The Mandalorian, the Volume is essentially an enormous circular digital soundstage. Instead of shooting against a green screen which is then superimposed with images in post-production, the Volume allows studios to project backgrounds and other imagery directly onto the wrap-around screens.
According to a new interview with production VFX supervisor Angus Bickerton, the use of the Volume was something that co-showrunner Miguel Sapochnik pushed for, which led to the building of a brand new soundstage at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden, nicknamed “the V stage.” The production initially marked out five scenes to shoot on the Volume, but it sounds like the team incorporated the tool more and more as they grew accustomed to using it.
“But also Miguel wanted to try to use the volume for the flying sequences as well,” Bickerton told IndieWire. “Which means that any time we have one of our actors on a motion base, the difficulties are always how to do the interactive lighting. By using the volume, we could travel a disk of light across, and wrap it around our 270-degree oval screen. The hope was that we would use the volume to give us better, more interactive, realistic lighting.”
In terms of actually animating the backgrounds displayed on the Volume’s wrap-around screen, HBO enlisted Canadian production studio Pixomondo. Pixomondo had previously worked on Game of Thrones, and now they’re responsible for animating the prequel’s menagerie of different dragons. The studio already had experience with their own in-house Volume system, which gave them a big advantage when it came to programming scenes for the new one in Leavesden.
“In this particular sequence, whether you see Luke on Arrax or Aemond on Vhagar, they’re on the motion base, they’re in the Volume, and I asked Pixomondo to create a 20-second cycle of lightning storm clouds,” Bickerton explained. “We took a 90-degree view and replicated it on the screen and played that around them. We still would augment shots of the rider so you would see a glimpse of CG wing in the background.”
Storm’s End broke all the rules for using the Volume digital soundstage
The production was warned not to use water or smoke in the Volume because it could damage the expensive wall of LEDs. Since Storm’s End would feature a battle in the midst of a terrible thunderstorm, the team had to come up with some creative workarounds.
“Because [director Greg Yaitanes and cinematographer Pepe Avila del Pino] wanted wind, smoke, and driving rain hitting the actors, the last thing the keepers of the expensive LED-wall set up wanted was to harm the expensive equipment,” Bickerton said. “The smoke needed to be ventilated properly to prevent coating on the screens, so we did extensive testing to prevent smoke build up. And we had separate fans blowing water off camera away from the screens.”
Another way the production pushed the limits of what had been done in the Volume was by shooting with multiple cameras, something they were advised against. House of the Dragon used four cameras in the Volume for every scene, with two tracking the action and two capturing the backgrounds. “We got phenomenal coverage,” Bickerton said. “We learned how you need to incorporate the sets, and ultimately did things our own way after following in the footsteps of The Mandalorian.”
House of the Dragon season 1 is streaming now on HBO Max.
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