House of the Dragon’s epic dragon battle hinged on the details
Designing a full-grown dragon hasn’t changed much since the final seasons of Game of Thrones, but pulling off a dance with dragons? A completely different and vastly more complicated story, says the VFX team behind House of the Dragon season 2.
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Sunday night’s fourth episode brought the feud between the Blacks and the Greens to Rook’s Rest for one of the franchise’s most ferocious hours. What the episode lacked in the suffocating scale of Hardhome, showrunner Ryan Condal and director Alan Taylor made up for in big flippin’ dragon action. Aegon, riding Sunfyre, arrives at Rook’s Rest to lay waste to a helpless human army. Rhaenys, on Meleys, swoops in to put a stop to the bloodthirsty boy king. Then Aemond and the elder dragon Vhagar enter the fight to wreak havoc. Dragons fall, riders die, and explosions decimate the surroundings. In painting a picture of the scene to VFX supervisor Dadi Einarsson, Condal likened the effect of Aegon’s dragon crash to a napalm drop and the entirety of the encounter to history’s most gut-wrenching moments.
“The subtext of the scene is: It’s a line in the sand,” Einarsson says. “It’s all been hand-to-hand combat, but this is like they’re experiencing nuclear war for the first time.”
Tom Horton, House of the Dragon’s VFX producer, says the dragon brawl at Rook’s Rest — which at a point becomes 12 minutes of nonstop CGI action — “was the most difficult sequence. It was the one that we finished last.” The process began with considering character; the audience was familiar with the look and feel of Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion from Game of Thrones, and designs carried back in time to the era of House of the Dragon. But season 2 demanded even more consideration of personality and rider dynamic. The dragons had to be “characters in the show, and not just monsters or vehicles,” Einarsson says. “And the [battle] scene amplifies and exaggerates the character traits that Ryan had described to us.”
Through performance and often
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