"This is a show that couldn't have existed until four or five years ago because of the visual effects requirements." "In season 2 everything was building towards the Battle of Blackwater and so all our resources were saved really for that." "Season 3 I think it's more evenly spaced, where you have the Plaza of Pride for it's a huge step in for us," "The ice wall climbing in episode 6, the fight with the bear in episode 8." "Samwell versus the white walker." "This is the biggest year for visual effects and the story sort of allows for that and it gets bigger and bigger in terms of the scope and in terms of the visual effects." "The show keeps expanding and breathing more deeply" "It's always fun and exciting to see what else they have created because, you know, most of the real work happens when we're not here." "It's been really a year without a break and it's a lot of work and it's a lot of hours but you know it's--it's the greatest gig around." "The biggest challenge for visual effects for the--the whole team of Game of Thrones seen seasons through, is just the size of it." "Every single season there's a wealth of new challenges you're never doing the same thing twice." "We're perfecting what we've done before but we're building on that and also always introducing new elements to the story." "First time you've seen a giant, Jon Snow?" "Shooting Dany on the ship was really exciting there's was a huge animated world and we had a beautiful ship that Jimmy Jackson built for us and then everything else was up to our visual effects team." "For Dany's boat sequence with the dragons we sit down and said: "OK, what does everybody want for the sequence?"" "Then we go to pre this and we start lining up all of our cameras on the actual boat that we have modeled in the computer to match our set and then using digital cameras that match our real cameras sets that match our real sets, we block out all the action for the whole scene," "where the dragons need to fly, how the actor need react relative to the dragons but the camera angles and lenses should be and then from there we go on set, we mock up everything we did in the" "computer on set on the actual day with the actors with the full crew and then we take all of that, go into post, take our plates and then match what we planned in the first place with pre-release." "The dragons now are the size of swans so they're huge." "We get to watch them frolicking, get to watch them fishing." "Dany interacts with the dragons." "It's really hard sometimes to work with an actor who is having to interact with a creature that isn't there and so we try as much as possible to give them something to play against to give them something to look at and to touch." "On set we use a green tennis ball on a stick." "It's the standard way of getting highlines correct and interaction and I tend to puppeteer that myself because I sort of pre-performed what the dragon's gonna do and also you have to help the actor feel as if they're interacting" "with something and they're not sure what it's gonna do, so I push against" "Emilia's hand a little bit or take it away or nudge her, just do little things that I would imagine a dragon would do and then she interacts with it and then and we also have rubber standing dragons that are roughly the right size, roughly the right color." "It's strange I genuinely can't explain and it's kind of I'm--I'm--I'm a little bit odd," "I think, in my, like, just, connection with them as stuffed and, you know, animals for the uh... for the CGI." "The models go away and I still kind of definitely feel their presence which is quite lovely." "The dragons of season 2 were--were babies, you know, we--we put human ages on them so if the in dragons season 2 were five years old, dragons in season 3 are 16, they're sort of starting to come into their own they're" "starting to show off for their mom and they play, they joust around they guard." "We added some features to the dragons, some fins they both can bulge their eyes out, they can, you know, push their teeth out like a shark the chest and flames, they have a lot of real-world features that they employ if" "they sense in any danger." "What our supervisor, Jabbar, did for season 3 was come up with some ideas based on nature where you look at an animal and imagine what kind of threatening posture it might have." "We look at Komodo dragons we look at really every lizard-like reptilian thing on the planet so everything we do is based on reality." "You look at an animal and imagine what kind of threatening posture it might have and so you'll see in the dragons for season 3 they have a real developed threat-pose." "This season we have a Manticore which is sort of a scorpion-like creature that threatens Dany at the dock in Astapor." "This little girl appears and just seems like a little girl playing and she has a little ball she rolls it for Daenerys." "Daenerys picks it up and suddenly this Khal figure comes in and knocks the ball out of her hand:" ""Hey, what the hell is going on?"" "When it opens up this deadly creature shows itself and so that'll be a completely CG creation and it was designed mostly by the art department." "So they took my 3D model and sent that just emailed it to America and this is this is called stereolithography and it cuts out the exact form of our 3D model so this will be painted up so all parties concerned know what this thing's gonna look like." "We used it on set as the eye line and also as lighting reference when we were shooting the practical stuff and then the vendor built it out and we did the uh... the same photo research that we did with the dragons, looking at beetles bugs" "anything that has sort of an exoskeleton and settled on a junebug predominantly because though the way the light sheens and the iridescent quality of it because it's supposed to be from magic the reason it exists so it should have a familiar but also an otherworldly quality." "One of the interesting creative challenges of season 3 was to put together what does it look like when a white walker dies when Sam stabs the white walker with dragonglass and one of the ideas was that he would instantly like freeze over and that that" "frost would travel across the front of his body emanating from where he gets stabbed and that that would reveal that he's ice and once he becomes fully frozen he would then break up into ice chunks that would drop off him and" "ultimately turn into frost and dust that would blow away and this gust of wind that would be brought in with them." "Visual effects are very important to Game of Thrones and visual effects fall into two categories I think most of the viewers understand the dragons, the direwolves some of the more spectacular things that we do with visual effects but also what visual effects does time and time again is to add scope to the" "show in much more subtle ways." "There's a lot of times where we do have massive sets but they're not as massive as they look and a lot of sets after 20 feet or so they'll end and then we take over everything from there." "We wanna show the scope and scale of the show and we do that with visual effects and those are the most seamless effects throughout the show." "The creative process of coming up with a castle is to really start with what is the location and what is the feeling we're supposed to get when we see it just like we did with Dragonstone, like we did with the Red Keep, like we did" "with Harrenhal." "The first episode we meet Robb Stark and Roose Bolton and Robb's entire army coming to Harrenhal and Harrenhal has a great history it's really old as so many things are in Game of Thrones but it's the only structure that was destroyed by dragons, so we researched" "volcanic activity and--and--and so how rock melt, and so we--we made it look as if it was destroyed by dragon fire and and then it's been inhabited a number of times since then so the walls are being held up, it's sort of makeshift attempts to keep the" "whole thing from falling apart." "Last season we were quite familiar with Harrenhal we are introduced to it, so we were trying to maintain that sense of scale that we had on the austerity of Harrenhal you know, this is like quite a functional scary place really so it's kind of" "fitting that, you know, we stumbled on this massive bear pit." "The bear pit we built had a huge amount of conversation on how the hell to do it and where to put it and we really only had that one courtyard for Harrenhal." "It had to look like it's been there forever and they had to sort of look like it was made from gnarly wood and, you know, it wasn't polished." "From a scenic point of view that was quite a tricky one, I think, to pull off because it had to be structurally safe but at the same time it had to look like they've been there for a long time." "Then of course it had to be built in a fairly regular way because we're gonna have to shoot some of the aspects of that back in Los Angeles with the actual bear." "The actors were not allowed to be in the medium proximity with the bear because that was not really a safe thing to do so we built a bear pit in--in Belfast and an identical bear pit here in LA to be able" "to replicate a lot of the shots and to be able to keep the extras from Belfast in the LA shots and so we're always going to be a big visual effects scene that became even more visual effects intensive." "For the bear pit scene we used every trick in the book, we used green screen, we shot Jamie and Brienne in front of a green screen, we shot the bear in front of green screens." "You also have to take into consideration their problems with the bear" "The set in Belfast is actually an oval set and it's enclosed on all sides of the pit but the bear cannot be confined on in a 360 so we can only have half the set in Los Angeles." "Using clever cinema tricks you can put together a scene with two actors and a bear in an environment that's shot in several different places, in several different ways, on several different days." "We're taking her to King's Landing." "For King's Landing this year it was easy to make it look a little bit different because of the Battle of Blackwater so we built the same towers but we damaged them we charred them and we were far enough in along in the story that--that they're" "rebuilding so we researched medieval building techniques and it was actually a lot of research and a lot of illustrations about how--how they would have a reason you know, rebuilt these things and so digitally we just duplicated that." "The Sept of Baelor presented a bunch of different challenges, the design of it was that it'd be the most colossal cathedral that had ever been built and we shot it on a fairly small stage, we had to extend it using set extensions" "and we did that with green screen and we allowed the cameras to keep moving so the directors would be able to sweep through it and having just a kind of shot." "We tracked those shots and created a background for them that was a CG model that tracked with the cameras and extended the set in every direction." "Before we knew what it was we only knew that it had to be amazing, we knew it had to be the biggest structure in the the show's mythos at least to this point and as big a stage space as the" "show has, to build them we could only afford to build one small pie wedge." "There are seven enormous statues that are much older than the structure itself so the history is that the statues were carved, you know millennia ago and then moved into this giant structure that was built much later so it's very much like the egyptian artifacts that you would find in Rome." "It's like taking a walk through history." "And then we get to Astapor and Yunkai and" "Astapor and Yunkai are in Slaver's Bay." "Slaver's Bay is seaside, it's rich, they're trading cities, they're port cities and they had to have a very particular look to them but at the same time they needed to look like sister cities and one of" "the tools we used to tie them together was a bit of the architecture has a similar look to it but also it has a very iconic harpy that lives in the structure of the city that brings them both together." "Astapor has a gold leaf harpy and Yunkai has a marble harpy but they're basically the same shape and size, so" "Dan and David thought it would be nice to make a shot that lets us know the the geography of Yunkai because as a rule we only are--are looking up at it and so a lot of it is hidden behind this, the big outer gate." "Daario and Jorah are about to go into the city and have their battle, they are outside the gates and they're talking about what they're setting up to do but we needed a shot that said here's where they are" "here's where they're going, and here's how impressive this city is." "We decided to put big bonfires on either side of the marble harpy by the roof of the pyramids that are the highest points of Yunkai so the camera flies over that at night, it's all torch-lit and moonlit and it's a" "you just see this enormous cityscape of adobe buildings." "For Astapor we'll be using locations in Morocco and enhancing them and creating the city of Astapor where it doesn't now exist." "But what's great about as where we are now, this is where Astapor is located so unlike some of the other locations a lot of "what elsewhere it is" will be what the--"what Astapor is", you know, the" "sea wall which is several hundred years old, which is--exists here, you know it looks like an effect when you see it but it's actually real so we designed sort of a new city, a new old city which--which we're putting in." "There's a lot of crowds and as you can imagine with 8,000 Unsullied following Dany out of Astapor, those crowds will be visual effects enhanced in a big way." "We've got a big set here in Morocco which is the Plaza of Pride we have her addressing all the slaves and the whole kind of thing with Kraznys and the dragons and it's got to feel absolutely mammoth huge huge huge." "It looks unlike anything I've ever seen before, it's-- it's majestic and um... and it's just this kind of it is ridiculous." "Everybody wants to see the dragons do what they can do and this is in episode 4 is the first time that Drogon which is the main dragon and the black dragon sort of the alpha of the three, is set loose as a weapon." "What we try to do is be as photorealistic as possible and that starts with using real photographed elements so when Kraznys gets it and Drogon is in the corner of the screen and we're kind of over Drogon's shoulders, he's about to blast them" "what's really been photographed is a stuntman in a fire retardant suit being blasted by a flamethrower." "To create dragon fire you work with somebody like Stuart Brisdon, he's our special effects supervisor and when you mention fire or burning anything to" "Stuart he gets a slight little, the teeniest tiniest little glimmer in his eye and you know that his brain is going like this." "We've been using the chain for the dragon rig so the idea is the dragon's on the other end but obviously we haven't got a dragon, a real one so we've got to use a rig that will hold up the chain and we can move the" "chain around, shake it around so that it looks like there's a dragon on the end and we add on to that a fire rig so we have a flamethrower on the end basically." "We also shot a bunch of practical fire elements with Stuart with the same rig and then we comped those in but we've sort of avoided CG fire because we just don't think it looks quite as good." "We're doing an explosion on top of a wall with Dany standing in front of it about 40 feet in front of it so it's very controlled, it's a very safe explosion and we have four explosions that go off in a row so I wanted to be four just to create" "a massive fireball, just to back Dany really to show she's got the power." "And then the other part of what we did was take the 400 costumed extras and turn them into a thousand, we determined that we needed a camera at 200 feet so that we could shoot the big exit shot" "so we wanted to be up high enough so that we could see inside the plaza over the walls we wanted to see four big columns of the Unsullied exiting we wanted to see all of Astapor, we wanted to see the destruction, wanted to see the" "shoreline, the waves crashing then we wanted to see the dragons enter in the foreground in the air flying over so it's a lot of stuff to cram into one shot." "Probably the hardest thing to achieve was climbing the ice wall because aside from 30 feet of it, it didn't exist and we had the actors interacting with it non-stop and it's a long sequence it's almost 200 charts." "It required more resources than almost anything else and more planning than almost anything else um and more work after the fact that almost anything else this is probably the most visual effects intensive scene we've ever had, I think every shot is--is a visual effects shot." "It really started with previews where we sat down and tried to figure out if a batch of people are going to start climbing this ice wall like they're climbing a mountain how do we physically do that in a way that makes sense for production that" "tells the story that communicates the peril that these guys are in." "For the ice wall, you know, it all starts with having the proper set which is this 32 foot wide" "50-foot tall massive set that the actors can really climb, stunt guys can really climb." "and then visual effects picks up with, you know, they'll be wires that everyone has to have for safety and we'll take out all those wires so that people don't know that they were suspended while they're doing all this" "then for every time we shoot off the set you know we extend the ice wall indefinitely and into the distance but what really helps to have that real wall on set on the day and then we match to that and just make it larger than you" "could ever really build." "We've had to build it which has been huge and not sculpted which is essentially polystyrene and then it gets plastid, then it gets painted and then it gets covered with wax and then it gets painted again some times and then more wax" "then we build up the last, so you got a lovely feeling of the color just very sort of just like in real life, it is like slapped on the front, you sort of get it quite a so ghostly feel to it." "Yeah the wall climb was amazing, yeah, I'd I'd thought they'd build this kind of 10-foot high plastic wall that we have to go up and down 20 times to make it look like we're climbing, a lot, but actually they built a 50-foot high plaster and polystyrene" "wall that we could actually dig real ice axes into and dig our crampons into and do, you know, proper climbing." "It always again amazes me with this show when you turn up and they've built something that incredible." "The wall was an experience that I don't think I'm ever gonna be lucky enough to get again in my life, it was fantastic." "The wall was this plastic but it had like a wax in cover and so every time that you buried the axe it made the thud sound as if it was ice like it was incredible and I'm as, yeah" "we just kind of climbed and with--with the men down at the bottom they were brilliant, they'd come and help us with the wiring so you look like you are nimble and you come over when we really didn't want at all" "and then the wind machine would start blowing an ice machine would start blowing and so you peak kind of like 30 feet off the ground and it's not very high but kind of when you're up there there's only a mat below you're kind of looking down and you're like" "Holy crap!" "I've been a competiting climber when I was like 20 kilos and 20 years ago so I--I have the techniques in my blood but I really had to do a lot of training to get back the strength and when you're doing" "takes after takes after takes you have to really keep your muscles warm." "It was grueling it was really hard work it was physical and--and with the wind and the snow machine in your face and the other was done over six days I think." "Cut them loose!" "Orell and Tormund decide they're gonna cut" "Ygritte and Jon away so we devised a system dropping--dropping the stunt doubles and catch them from below." "When we did the actual drop they actually caught on secondary lines, they never actually hit the ground." "When you're in the visual effects review, you're toggling between where you're at with the final shot and what the original plate looked like what the original footage looked like, it's really satisfying to realize" "just how far it's come from the bunch of people climbing against a green screen on a white textured wall." "I think one of my favorite visual effects shots in season 3 is when they're on top of the wall at the end of episode 6." "By the time they get to the top of the wall the sun comes out." "The director of photography David Katznelson you know, lit them with some of this gorgeous kind of a peach color light and the set was a certain size for the top of the wall but obviously it needed to go on for miles" "so that was all the green screen stage shoot and we extended the set off into infinity really." "And we get that look just straight down the wall and we see the depth of it and the vastness of it it's quite a beautiful moment." "The final shot of season 3 is Dany is embraced by the now freed slaves of Yunkai." "The final shot needs to not only in the--the episode, but in the series or the series for the season so Dan and David felt that this sort of needed to encapsulate everything that" "Dany has achieved up to this point." "We usually start every season kind of knowing where does each character end this their journey for this coming season and--and we always felt this is where Dany ends her journey and it's such a powerful image that I felt like this is the appropriate image to end the season on." "We start on Dany, the dragon flies past her and out of the shot and then the camera cranes up and it just keeps going up and up and you see, you know, all of the Yunkai slaves, a huge mass of thousands." "We shot a lot of different elements of the crowd of thousands of people around her from a very high construction crane shooting straight down so that we have these tiles or sections of crowd from very high up and shrunk down so that we" "can put them and paste them all around her." "I feel like the idea was to really give us a sense of the scale the the size of the stage that she's playing on, just how many people were counting on her and then we're keeping the dragons in play because they're always such an" "important part of her identity, we just want to tie all of that together in one great shot." "We see the 8,000 Unsullied all in their formation and we see Yunkai clicking down from above we see more slaves pouring out and then ultimately Drogon who enters the shot, flies up and right past camera and we cut to black." "I think the expectations are very high for season 3" "I think we fulfilled them, I think one of the reasons we've been able to attract all of our department heads and most of our crew time and time again is because of the new challenges." "Watching actually unfold on screen and seeing these sequences end up even better than I had in my imagination so it was one of the really, you know, most fulfilling moments working on the show." "The production schedule was really challenging and very demanding but everybody just brings their heart to it it's a labor of love." "It's all fun, everyone loves it, everyone watches it, for somebody who does what I do it's a feast, you know, and everybody who's involved in it is excited to be involved in it." "The show wouldn't exist without these guys and--and we're lucky to have them."