Over the course of its eight seasons, Game of Thrones brought to life the continents of Westeros and Essos. The intricately detailed and balanced world then contained a host of characters, each with their own characteristic traits, that chronicled the rise of Daenerys Targaryen, played by Emilia Clarke, from a traded-off bride to the most powerful in-universe figure for a brief while.
However, the storyline would have paled in contrast to the ambitious setup if not for the selling point of the show, its dragons.
Three in number, the mythical creatures became the single most recognizable entity of the entire franchise, a fact that its spinoff, House of the Dragons, took into account. Dialing their number all the way up to 17 and having its prominent face, Emma D’Arcy as Queen Rhaenyra, marking many of her prime moments atop the legendary beasts, would have neither come cheap nor easy.
Taking a cue from the struggles that the VFX team faced on the main show, it would simply be mind-boggling to take into account what the situation would have been for the prequel iteration.
Game of Thrones resorted to CGI for Emilia Clarke
In what the VFX supervisor for the show, Derek Spears, termed a “nightmare”, Game of Thrones witnessed a dire need to reinvent as the story required Emilia Clarke to ride her dragons into the sky by the start of season six. The team placed a wooden frame encased as a placeholder for the mighty beasts atop which the actress would sit and enact as if she were taking a flight. However, they failed to bring out realism.
In talks with Vulture, Spears laid out the issue as,
What we found out is that dragons aren’t like solid pieces of wood. They move, and when they move, they flex, and their muscles move too. So we had the dragon flying and the muscles moving — but Dany’s legs didn’t react to any of it. So we had to replace her legs.
The visual team then resorted to a unique solution that not only employed CGI for the dragons but also for their ‘mother’. A grueling amount of work went into rendering Daenerys Targaryen’s legs react to the movements of the dragons, especially her knee, which otherwise appeared motionless. In fact, the team had a much harder time managing the intricacies of the digital leg than the massive dragons themselves.
We ended up replacing her legs on so many of the shots just to get it to follow the trap muscles on the back of the dragon. It was a nightmare. Everything else in those sequences was easy compared to trying to get her to sit on top of the stupid dragon with its stupid muscles.
In stark comparison, the situation would likely become even more brutal for the follow-up season for one particular commitment by its showrunners.
House of the Dragon season two puts Emma D’Arcy at the helm of franchise’s biggest bet yet
The plot for season two of House of the Dragon has the Queen Rhaenyra faction engage in open war with the Hightowers. The brutal end of the first season set up tensions at boiling point and has thus paved the way for the biggest battle scenes in the history of the franchise, as teased by showrunner, Ryan Condal. The biggest takeaway obviously implied that the incumbent season will feature the highest number of dragons ever witnessed in the HBO universe’s outings.
Moreover, with the character of Emma D’Arcy receiving arguably the most promising flight time in the previous seasons, it would be safe to assume that she would only take her flying fire-breathing giants to the doorstep of her adversaries, as witnessed in the trailers, and thus, bring about a similar, if not an aggravated visual challenge for the VFX team.
Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon are available to stream on Max, Max Amazon Channel, and Spectrum On Demand.
