The scale is unlike anything I've ever seen before.
But that set's a beautiful set.
Come on.
We set fire to a lot of people.
Everybody loves to fire a scorpion. 'Cause why?
You can kill dragons!
Emma never complained.
I was freezing.
Spoiler alert...
I ride a dragon.
Episode 207 begins on a beach, a desolate beach,
and Rhaenyra meets Addam of Hull
who, somehow, has claimed the dragon Seasmoke
that belonged to Rhaenyra's husband, Laenor.
How did this happen? Who is Addam of Hull?
The opening of 207, we had always set on the beach.
We really wanted that kind of vast landscape
that you have at Driftmark.
I swore after season one that we were never
going back to a coastline again.
And we found ourselves there for that scene,
thankfully, for just a brief day.
Beautiful beach when the sun's out
and we were filming right on the tideline.
The problem there, of course, is the continuity of the tide.
It doesn't sit and wait for you
so you're chasing down the beach and back up the beach.
So when you're scheduling a scene like that,
you have to work out exactly what direction works for what time.
So you schedule based on
how the tide comes in and tide goes out.
Now what we didn't anticipate
is that we were gonna be in the worst of Welsh weather.
The rain was falling, the wind was howling,
the sand was blowing, the waves were crashing.
And the tide was comin' in quicker and harder than we could've ever thought.
Let's go again! The tide's coming closer!
You stand before the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms
with a dragon of House Targaryen!
I'd actually hoped for a storm
because you can just sort of see it, can't you?
This sort of face-off.
I honestly loved it.
And it was the first time me and Clinton got to shoot together.
Emma never complained. I was freezing.
I filmed with Seasmoke the day before I filmed with Emma
so it was really sunny, beautiful.
I was running all day with Seasmoke and it was beautiful.
And then,
the tide and the storm came in for the scene with Emma
which really influenced the scene.
You kneel quickly
for a man so suddenly elevated.
This dragon came to me.
It's a beautiful dragon line to open that episode,
you know, in terms of wonderful,
you know, opportunities for our dragons to kinda step forward
and kinda be part of that drama.
It's pretty big and it's pretty vast.
You know, Loni put a lot of kinda passion and prep into just establishing
an epic scale and look.
And then we had our dragon performers.
We had our guys in blue suits with a dragon head.
For all of the weather issues that we had, it really did look epic.
And, I think, when you've got two big dragons in there as well,
I think it's gonna be a fantastic opening to the episode.
Do you think you can get him to Dragonstone?
I can try.
One of the things I loved in 207
is that we had a lot of different vignettes
that took place in a lot of cool places
and one of those cool places is the godswood,
which is at the foot of Harrenhal.
That particular godswood is unique because just across the God's Eye,
there's the Isle of Faces.
Like so if you know mythology, you know that this island is important.
This is the godswood that's fallen into disuse.
You know, we know that Harrenhal was built
on a felled orchard of weirwood trees
and then the weirwoods were chopped up and used as lumber to build the castle,
which possibly led to some of the experiences that people have there.
The Harrenhal godswood went through various processes
of what it should be, what scale it should be.
And so, ultimately, it came back to the backlot
and it became part of the ruined garden
with the weirwood tree standing on a rockscape
at the end of the garden.
This is a much darker, sort of more mysterious,
kind of almost, almost nightmarish sort of version of the godswoods.
To evoke the Harrenhal sort of vibe of,
"This is a ruined castle."
Unlike the Red Keep godswood which was, generally, well-tended and kept
this one has fallen into total, you know, disarray.
I mean, the first time Daemon walks in there,
there's a bunch of broken carts all scattered around.
I mean, it seems like a back garden storage
for the people at Harrenhal.
It was a great dramatic concept.
Lake behind, rocks with the walls coming up to it
and then these enormous great roots from this giant tree
just breaking it all to pieces.
That was weeks and weeks and weeks working with Conrad.
From a maquette to the real thing, as it was polysculpted.
There's a metal armature in there.
A lot of metalwork inside it to keep those branches from falling.
We had quite a lot of real branches in amongst there.
And then it's all taken apart and it was transported down here
and then put back together again.
There's also all the leaves.
They have to be painted first into that color
then attached to those branches, so lots and lots of work.
But that set's a beautiful set.
Our big visual effects challenge is the godswood tree.
So they've built the base of the tree and then we're extending it.
And again, what's lovely about the show
is everything's so character-based that even the tree is a character.
And, yes, I think there is a face
that people may or may not recognize
but I'm going to require you to go to the videotape
and figure it out for yourself.
There's a new face in there.
I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about who the face is.
Yeah, we've got quite a famous face in there
that might be recognizable.
- The face on the weirwood tree is... - George R. R. Martin.
Yes, George.
Is it? I didn't know that. Oh, that's good. I like that.
Which Ryan wanted to do as a bit of a tribute
and the idea was that it gradually started to disappear
back into the bark of the tree.
The brief was to make it feel enough like him
but you're never really sure.
The idea is that you don't look at it
straight away and say, "That's George R. R. Martin."
You do a second take and say, "Ooh, is that?"
This is really cool, guys. Thank you.
The dragonseeds come into the Dragonmont, which is this huge cavern
with, I guess, what could be described as a mounting block, 10 meters high.
The scale is unlike anything I've ever seen before.
You go into these huge sound stages and they've built a gantry,
a perfect, huge gantry.
And at the end of that, there's a dragon.
It's not actually a dragon there. They do that post-production.
In 207, we're working with dragons,
so a lot of the preparation that we did was looking into
how do we burn people, and how do we eat people?
And that was a collaboration that began in visual effects.
It was the "Why did I ever take this job" moment.
"What was I thinking?"
Massive cavern, dragon the size of a jumbo jet so no hiding here.
And then, 45 dragonseeds on a platform
that was off the ground by at least a story and a half.
Well, we wanted it to start in a similar way to 206
so you know that you're coming to a place you've been to before.
Then, when all hell breaks loose,
and the dragon starts burning everybody and eating everybody,
then we wanted to feel completely different
and switch to something very dynamic.
Most of that scene was shot handheld.
It's a massive scene, and it was just hugely enjoyable
to plan that with Loni.
We had a very detailed storyboard and very detailed previs
to know where the dragon is and what the dragon is doing.
You can previsualize with your lenses,
your camera, your blocking, and then, when you arrive on set,
everyone knows what they're doing.
We had a big, blue proxy nose made
for Rhaenyra to interact with.
Not only we just build this head, we also had puppeteer animating it,
looking exactly what's motion dragon, what's the motions gonna be,
so the actor can actually interact with it.
They're a character themselves.
And Loni got them performing, bending down, subjugating.
It was extraordinary to see
Emma D'Arcy put their hand on the blue screen buck,
knowing that when you see it in all of fandom,
you will be like, "That is one of the scariest,
coolest moments I've ever seen."
Because you know what Emma D'Arcy felt?
You know what Rhaenyra felt?
They felt power.
What this is gonna be is when Rhaenyra turns around and looks at the seeds,
it will evoke that exact poster frame of Rhaenyra
in front of the dragon.
Who among you would be first?
Someone's gonna die today.
Someone's gettin' set on fire, and I'm so excited.
- It might be you. - It's not me.
Spoiler alert...
I ride a dragon.
Historically, in "Game of Thrones,"
what makes the dragons real is that our fire is real.
We continue that legacy, so when you see this episode,
it is not CGI fire that you are seeing.
It is real fire with our real actors in front of the real fire.
And that was done through very meticulous planning
with the stunt team, with the special effects team,
hair and makeup, and wardrobe to figure out how are we going
to burn this many people?
Basically, all of the smartest people in the room
are deciding how to shoot people on fire.
And we're just muckin' about.
Three, two, one, action!
It's a big, big fire event, and there's a lot happening.
There's the full burn mask, which is a pretty
spooky-looking thing when you see it.
That's not really camera-ready.
So those ones, we definitely have to do a face replacement.
A kind of half-burned mask.
They're actually, like, they look fantastic,
so we're having to do very little to those.
When we're doin' the partial burns and people aren't being engulfed,
we'll just apply sort of silicone bald caps
with pre-painted on and pre-sculpted burns that cover their ears.
And then we've got a piece that covers their neck
and we have some pieces to cover their faces,
so we're keeping all this clear
which should not be in the fire anyway.
So you get to see the fire just lickin' up around their ears,
around the backs of their heads.
And it looks like, "How are they tolerating it?"
But it does the job, at least for the 15 seconds they're on fire,
and then, obviously,
the guys with the fire extinguishers come in.
In 207, we burned 45 seeds in various different ways.
The biggest of the burns,
we had a 16-man burn that happened all at once.
And in that burn, we see Vermithor, essentially, unleash his biggest blast.
But that particular set is five meters in the air.
And there was a danger in having people who were,
first of all, on fire, and second of all, blinded,
because you have to be to protect your eyes.
So for all of those very good reasons, we did it outside on an eight-inch-high
approximation of the platform.
And we've created a safe environment where we could use Tamar ignition devices
to put these people on fire.
Ready! And three, two, one, action!
Okay, you just witnessed a major burn on the set.
Open air this time, which is a lot easier for us.
We put charges into the ground to ignite the stuntmen
who were drenched in a fire gel.
On cue, we sequenced it so it looked like a dragon run,
and it took them all up nicely, I thought.
It looked very good, very hot.
And it worked amazing.
I got my hand shook by the producer, so I'm good, I'm happy.
I'm gonna go home and go to bed now. See you later.
Ten, 11, 12, out, out, out!
In 207, we claim two dragons. Hugh claims Vermithor.
Ulf claims Silverwing.
These two claiming moments are very, very different.
Hugh takes us on a journey from the top of the gantry
down into the bowels of the Dragonmont.
And what we wanted to do is we wanted to sort of
distinguish Hugh's journey
from the mass amount of chaos that happened up on the plinth.
We decided to do that by taking away cuts.
I always love the subjectivity of a great, well-staged Steadicam shot
that takes a single character through an abyss of action.
We looked at the best of the best of the long takes
that happened in action scenes, and what made those scenes great
is that there's always something happening in layers.
One of the challenges was that Hugh is running in the scene
so just being able to run with him and still see what's going on
because of the choice of handheld camera means
that, also, you're going to have a very shaky image.
We still wanted to see what's going on.
There were so many moving elements in terms of the size of the dragon
and the scale of the dragon
that we had-- everyone had to hit their marks precisely.
And we couldn't cheat the framing.
And also coordinating that with all the stuntwork.
We literally had stuntpeople
falling from the ceiling, on fire,
which added the, as you can imagine, another layer of complexity.
It's a tremendous amount of work, and then, lots and lots of layering
and visual effects to get it to come together.
It is very complicated scene because it's all one shot.
So, in order to achieve it,
we had to split it to pieces and do invisible transition.
Hugh runs along, he looks up,
the camera looks up to see what he's looking at.
Vermithor's blasting someone.
We come back and that's then another take,
comes around to the rock, we look over the rock,
as we look at what he's looking at,
and then come back down, that's another take.
So we've designed all these stitch points into the shot.
So it is a oner that you'll see no cuts in that was made out of seven or eight pieces
that includes dragons, burns, feedings,
and, eventually, a bonding all in one moment
where Vermithor takes a knee with a small man, Hugh,
who puffs his chest and says--
Come on!
Vermithor is called the Bronze Fury because he's bronze and he's furious.
He's nearly the size of Vhagar, and he is, famously,
one of the most vicious dragons in the kingdom.
My background, I come from visual effects and animation,
so any time I get on a blue screen with actors with fake things,
I'm like, "Oh, this is like home."
And I got to basically play dragonriding with Tom and with Ewan
in the kind of penultimate sequence,
which features Vhagar chasing Silverwing to Dragonstone.
The main challenge for the buck work this season was
we wanted to really add element of handheld to the buck work
so that you feel like you're sitting on the dragon with the rider.
So, we had to come up with a way
of shooting something that feels handheld
but it's actually remotely operated.
I'm working with the ball tech's arm
that's sort of rigged on top of a container
and then, we're working with the buck,
and it almost feels like the camera's attached to the dragon itself.
The buck is moving to a set computer program
and the camera is doing that as well
as it has already been designed in the previs.
The putting the pieces together was quite easy.
The fun part was actually working with Tom and Ewan
to actually see the dragon.
We tried to create a sense of a lack of anticipation
so when the dragon turns right, it's like a trust fall.
They have to not anticipate anyone being there
and then they have to kind of counter that fall
with a drastic movement.
So when you see them, what makes it real is this sense of, like, unpredictability,
despite the fact that we're working in a very predicted manner.
You're effectively suspended in the air on this mechanical bucking bronco.
You've got wind, you've got atmos.
And you're in a backbend, and you're 43,
and there's blokes shooting leaf blowers at you.
- Fantastic hairdo now. - Thank you so much.
And your work will only make this better.
It's because you're worth it.
I am.
You get that beautiful tableau of Rhaenyra and her dragon army
and, literally, the dragon queen coming out of the Dragonmont
and we see that it worked.
Whatever challenges were put to her
and whatever questions she was faced with,
she was right in the end and was able to assemble this army of dragons.