Emmy-Nominated ‘Game Of Thrones’ VFX Artist Explains Dany’s Dragon Wings

Game of Thrones may be over, but Season 8’s chances to win Emmys and other prestigious entertainment awards are just beginning. Today, HBO’s popular fantasy drama racked up a record-breaking 32 nominations that encompassed everything from acting, to directing, to costumes, to hairstyling, to music, to computer-generated imagery, and more.

Almost no nomination stone was left unturned for a show that literally changed the way television is produced and enjoyed. Even with several spinoffs and prequels currently in the works—even with the backlash against the last six episodes—it feels like nothing (at least not for a while) can come close to capturing the pop culture magic cast by all eight seasons of Game of Thrones.

Regardless of how you felt watching the finale you cannot deny the massive technical achievements that went into turning George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels into a living, breathing entity. If you saw The Last Watch documentary the week after the series finale aired, then you understand just how much effort goes into a project of this size and scope. Of course, the show’s effectiveness owes a lot to its ensemble cast, but given the fantasy aspects, it also relies heavily on visual effects.

A great mix of the two comes in the opening moments of the series finale—”The Iron Throne—when Dany (Emilia Clarke) observes the utter destruction she has wrought on King’s Landing.

As the “Breaker of Chains” steps forward to accept the twisted admiration of the Dothraki and the Unsullied, her last-living dragon, Drogon, lands behind her and spreads his wings, creating a split second optical illusion of the membranous reptilian appendages looking like Dany’s wings. It’s a really iconic shot that symbolically confirms that the character has succumbed to madness; the very madness that led to her own father’s assassination at the hands of Jaime Lannister so many years before.

“It was such a powerful moment that we had to make sure the environment was 100% consistent with multi-angle sequence of her giving the victory speech that followed,” said Mohsen Mousavi, a VFX supervisor at Scanline VFX, which handled the majority of CGI shots for the last three episodes in Season 8. “We didn’t do any cheating through the camera for that particular shot, so we needed to make sure everything from the distance to Dany at which the dragon was sitting, the layout of the buildings, and everything behind her were exactly right to get that memorable composition of the dragons wings merging with Danny. It involved some back and forth with Image Engine [the VFX vendor that animates the show’s dragons] to get it right, but we’re very happy to hear that fans loved that particular shot so much.”

“Steve Kullback and the visual effects supervisor, Joe [Bauer], had spent close to a decade working to create a solid foundation for the visual effects, and wanted to make sure the fans got the pay off [in the final season] and us vendors could jump right into executing their creative vision,” Scanline VFX producer, Marcus Goodwin, explained. “Throughout the entire process, Steve and Joe had a great overview of all the assets and made sure we got everything that we needed, from actor scans, reference photography, to measurements of every inch of a set build. They spent a lot of time planning out every angle of the shoot, and this constant dedication continues to show up on screen every single season.”

While dragons obviously don’t exist in our reality, HBO and Scanline still wanted the aftermath of Dany’s fiery rampage to feel grounded and relatable. To that end, they were provided with real-world reference materials that helped them in realizing the complete decimation of a familiar Westeros landmark.

“They gave us some references of bombed out Dresden after the second World War,” Mousavi continued. “The idea was to recapture that sense of devastation that Dany and the actors are portraying on screen. We made sure that the tone of the buildings and the palette that we used in the aftermath in the background followed a more monochromatic color scheme. It helped elevate the drama of the sequence. And you can relate to it if you’ve seen any devastating images of damaged cities or bombed cities, especially the iconic black and white documentaries from WWII.”

And again, dragons don’t exist, but their fantastical fire-breathing abilities still need to abide by natural rules that can stretch our disbelief without breaking it. For instance, after Jon Snow (Kit Harington) murders Dany, Drogon melts the Iron Throne out of pain and emotion before flying off with his mother’s body.

“The first thing that we worked on was the throne-melting sequence in the series finale,” Mousavi said. “It was such an important and iconic sequence for HBO to make sure that we got it right. We came up with some additional camera work that was done to showcase the physics of the simulation through multiple angles. They were also carefully designed to elevate the drama of the sequence. Some of those unplanned witness camera shots became actual shots and made it into the final cut [of the episode]. HBO wanted to make sure that it didn’t look too fantastical, and that we weren’t trying to over-do it or over-dramatize. They wanted to make sure it looked as real as possible, and that when you look at it, you can relate to it and you’re not seeing ‘visual effects.’ But at the same time, it needed to be cool. We got a lot of [reference material] of lava flowing and melting metal to make sure [the VFX looked genuine].”

Thanks to his work on the penultimate episode (“The Bells”), Mousavi was able to land a well-deserved Emmy nomination today in the category of Outstanding Special Visual Effects.

“We are humbled by today’s Emmy nomination, and want to thank the amazing and talented team at Scanline VFX and HBO that made this possible!” he finished. “Working on a project of this scope, and it being the final three episodes of the final season, it has been a dream for everyone to be involved with. We had a lot of people on the team that wanted to keep adding more and more details and interest to each shot, even when we said it’s finished, because they were so proud as fans of the show. [They] knew that they would be sitting next to their family and friends when it aired, and needed it to be perfect.”

The full list of nominees for the 71st Primetime Emmys can be found here.