How Rodeo FX brought Moondancer, Silverwing and House of the Dragon's other dragons to life

If you start watching a show called House of the Dragon, you're going to expect some good dragon scenes. Happily, the series delivers. Not only are there a ton of dragons to enjoy, they all have their own personalities and are brought to vivid life by the fine people at Rodeo FX. The dragon-vs-dragon fight scene in the fourth episode of season 2, "The Red Dragon and the Gold," was the best scene of its kind ever put on the screen. Who's competing with this?

Martin Pelletier, who works at Rodeo FX, talked to Collider about bringing scenes like that to life. Animating dragons is a tricky business, in part because there's no animal in our world that's quite like them. Rodeo FX looks at bats and Komodo dragons for inspiration, but they didn't "the scale that we’re looking for."

Somehow they managed. Surprisingly, the hardest dragon scene to animate was one that sort of flew under the radar, no pun intended: it was the bit where Baela Targaryen encountered Ser Criston Cole on her dragon Moondancer, running them into a forest. Apparently that scene was "by far" the most technically challenging, mainly on account of the lighting. “We had massive light shifts, so you went from a full-blown overcast shot to a full sunny day backlit,” Pelletier shared. To make it look right, they had to replace the whole sky, among other things.

I was interested to hear that Pelletier and his team figured out Moondancer's flying speed when putting this scene together; apparently this clocks in at 150 miles per hour, which seems extremely fast. Baela should really be wearing goggles.

Or maybe not, because the team made adjustments after animating Baela and Moondancer chasing Criston and his soldiers near the ground. “The 150 MPH rule wasn’t making a lot of sense when we were scraping off the ground,” Pelletier said. So they slowed things down so it looked more realistic.

The team thought about the dragon's personality, too. They conceived of Moondancer as “kind of a punk, kind of reckless, aggressive,” with snappier and more twitchier movements. On the other hand, an older dragon like Silverwing — whom we meet later in the season during the Red Sowing — was supposed to come off as "fearless, super strong, yet elegant and really smart.”

The dragons steal the show, but Rodeo FX also does a lot of environment work that people are less likely to notice, including changing the face of the Red Keep in subtle ways for season 2. That's the way Pelletier likes it; if we notice that an environment is fake, the team hasn't done their job. “You almost want it to go under the radar completely,” Pelletier said. “VFX is there to support the story, but in the end, we’re not in any kind of way the hero of a story...If we manage to make it feel like it’s been shot like it’s a drone shot or whatever, then we’ve done our job perfectly fine,”

See what he means in Rodeo FX's House of the Dragon VFX reel below:

We can expect more spectacular effects whenever House of the Dragon returns for its third season. Unfortunately, that probably won't be until 2026.

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