We only saw nine out of 22 dragon characters in House of the Dragon season 1

Last year, HBO debuted House of the Dragon, the first of potentially several spinoffs of its phenomenally successful show Game of Thrones. This one is set over 100 years before the original, back when the Targaryens were at the height of their power and dragons crowded the skies.

Obviously dragons are a big part of this show; it’s right in the title. We’ve already met several, and according to visual effects supervisor Angus Bickerton, we ain’t seen nothing yet. “We went into this series listing 22 different dragon characters,” he told The Brunswick News. “We only featured nine of them this season. There’re probably gonna be more in Season 2.”

Off the top of my head, in the first season we met Syrax, Caraxes, Seasmoke, Meleys, Vhagar, Arrax and Vermithor, and maybe Vermax, Sunfyre and Dreamfyre. And there are indeed many we haven’t seen yet; get ready.

House of the Dragon: Vhagar’s design was inspired by whales

Not only will we meet a lot of new dragons in House of the Dragon season 2; a lot of them are going to scrap, and the crew is ready. They had some practice with this sort of thing in the season finale of season 1, where the huge dragon Vhagar makes a snack out of the much smaller dragon Arrax.

“Vhagar’s head [alone] is the size of a small, six-person vehicle,” Bickerton said. “We talked about trying to reflect their ages and characters in their animation, to reflect their riders. In the case of Vhagar, she’s so old, she’s had three riders; she’s no longer beholden to anybody. She’s irascible and ill-tempered and can’t be necessarily controlled. It’s subtle, because you can’t anthropomorphize them too much. You can’t give them a squint or a mini-smile; it has to be animal in performance.”

"So for Vhagar, we took references from whales. She has these parasitic birds that live on her, eating mites and bugs off her skin. The rigging and saddles are now cutting into her skin because she’s actually grown around it."

With the inspiration in place, Bickerton and company got down to the task of putting together this very complicated sequence, which involved multiple effects houses. “We animated the whole flight in Unreal, then loaded into Third Floor’s ‘Cyclops’ system,” he said. “This is their particular version of a virtual camera; now you are in the scene, just looking for the coolest angles. We didn’t storyboard and then pre-vis; we did it entirely through these virtual-camera sessions.”

"We got very long takes. It’s not an animator sitting down and doing a five-second shot. Our visual effects editor edited that together, then we exported those files to another vendor who reanimated all the dragon stuff."

From there the actors came in; they were photographed inside the Volume, which is kind of a 360-degree LED sound stage where any fantastical environment can be projected onto the walls. This is different from a green screen, where the actor acts opposite something that will only be inserted later; in the Volume, the scene feels much more real and immediate, even if it’s all being projected on giant LED screens.

The actors were also on dragon rigs programmed to move and buck with the virtual wind and rain. “We had a team do what we call a ‘Techvis,’ where you figure out how to translate that animation to the motion base and the camera, because the camera’s moving separately as well, so we’re getting the appropriate shots of them on the dragon backs,” Bickerton said.

"It allowed the performances to change. Sometimes if you’re just doing a three-second shot…you feel like you’re just a component in a big CG effect. If you’re allowed a long take, you feel involved and in the action."

All that said, when it comes to filmmaking, sometimes the old ways are best. “The best shots we got were when we actually put loads of Vaseline on the camera lens,” Bickerton said. “So we had [actual] wind and rain, but we were literally smearing Vaseline on the lens to get that sort of shooting-in-the-storm cinematography.”

You can stream the first season of House of the Dragon on Max right now. The second season will air on HBO and Max sometime in 2024.

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