How ‘ House of the Dragon ’ Turns Fiery Fantasy Into television Reality

For the “ Game of Thrones ” prequel series, the directors had to figure out how to make the title beasts believably bigger, badder and more prominent.  At the  threat of mixing medieval conceits, dragons are a double- whetted  brand.  

For Ryan Condal, theco-creator and showrunner of HBO’s “ House of the Dragon, ” the  brutes are  crucial to the show’s magic, literally and figuratively. 

“They’re the one fantasy element that we ’ve allowed ourselves, ” he said. “ In our world, in this period, the magic is these dragons.”  

But they’re also death incarnate. “ It’s all conceit, all  fable for nuclear conflict, ” Condal said. “ You take the  megacity with an army if you want it to be standing  subsequently. You ca n’t do anything surgical with a dragon.”  

The ongoing alternate season of the “ Game of Thrones ” prequel has included  further of these beautiful, terrible beasts than any other in the ballot, including spectacular air battles in the fourth  occasion, “ The Red Dragon and the Gold. ” Sunday’s  investiture, “ The Red Sowing, ” in which aspiring dragon riders claim new mounts or die trying was more  predicated, but it presented the most complicated challenge yet.  In interviews last week, Condal, the visual  goods  administrator Dadi Einarsson and some of the actors charged with piloting the  brutes onscreen explained how they brought it all to life.  

The test case 

“In a big way, Season 1 was  evidence of conception for the series to come, ” Condal said. “ We designed Season 1 to tell this hopefully compelling Shakespearean family drama that would  make it to this final act where we’d see the first dragon fight.”  

In the performing skirmish in the Season 1  homestretch, the  youthful Prince Lucerys Velaryon and his small dragon, Arrax, are killed by Vhagar, the enormous, centuries-old beast ridden by the one- eyed  legionnaire Prince Aemond Targaryen.  

“Vhagar fighting Arrax is like a rhino versus a house cat, ” Condal said. “ But it had the  rudiments. It was a chase, it had two dragons, you had two actors riding on  defiles and everything differently was digital. It was an entirely virtual sequence, basically. 

Still, ” he continued, “ we could take the  intermediating time and a half( before Season 2) to do the R&D to figure out how to escalate, “ If we could pull that off and get the  followership with it.”


Get to know your dragons 

Each dragon has its own distinct look, size, sounds, achromatism and personality. Condal and others work with abstract controversy to nail down the look of each one. “Weeks and weeks of duplications on that,” he said.  

The  product had stat  wastes for the different dragons, Einarsson said, with details like size, strength, color,  address and their first rider, in the prehistory of the show. “ All of those  effects are important for us to be  suitable to carve a multidimensional character,   a commodity that’s not just a  commonplace or a  critter,” he said.  

When the designs are finished, they go to visual  goods companies like Weta FX and Rodeo FX to be  dilate  out into the completely articulated three- dimensional  brutes  observers see onscreen.  

“One of the main  pretensions for the season was to treat the dragons as characters, not just as beasts or modes of transportation, ” Einarsson said.  

crucial dragons have had much more to do in Season 2, and in  further  pictorial detail. These include Vhagar and the two beasts she  subdued in occasion 4 during the Battle of Rook’s Rest Meleys, killed with her rider, Princess Rhaenys; and King Aegon’s Sunfyre,  dolorously wounded but whose fate remains unknown. In the sixth  occasion, “ Smallfolk, ” Seasmoke, abandoned by Laenor Velaryon in Season 1, chose its own new rider Addam of Hull, a humble shipbuilder who’s  intimately related to Laenor.  “ Dragons are  veritably intelligent  brutes, ” said Clinton Liberty, who plays Addam. “ Seasmoke can  smell who the human is behind the facade of who the human’s trying to portray. ” 

In Sunday’s  occasion, two dragons who have been little- seen and riderless so far in the show take center stage Silverwing and Vermithor.   “ Silverwing was the stately old dragon of the good Queen Alysanne, ” Condal said.“

I described her as the Britannia, the boat that Queen Elizabeth did her progresses on. She  clearly didn’t do any fighting. She was the Concorde.”   In Sunday’s  occasion, Queen Rhaenyra, played by Emma D’Arcy, recruits commoners of noble blood — the illegitimate children of Targaryen royals, known as dragonseeds — to see if these dragons will accept them as riders, in order to expand her army.

utmost die in fiery agony, but an  unpretentious teetotaler  named Ulf claims Silverwing.   “ I worked out  relatively  snappily that Silverwing is one of the kinder dragons and, I believe, the most beautiful, ” said Tom Bennett, who plays Ulf. His performance is different as a result “ It’s the first time you ever get to see someone flying a dragon laughing. ”  Vermithor was  commodity differently, said Kieran Bew, who plays a commanding blacksmith named Hugh. The significance of the character, who has been seen throughout the season, is revealed when he claims the ill- tempered dragon.  

“We talked about how Vermithor is the Citation Fury — an angry dragon, ” he said. “ From a performance perspective, knowing that leads to the choices Hugh makes during the claiming. You ’ve got to make yourself big, man.”

has ever seen  factual dragons, and there’s little precedent for large- scale, realistic dragon action in earlier  flicks and television series. So “ House of the Dragon ” has many  egregious models to draw from.   For the Battle of Rook’s Rest, which featured  expansive dragon- on- dragon conflict in broad daylight, the  platoon looked to the skies for alleviation. The camera angles for the  confrontations were inspired by World War II  pictures. The  twisting clash between Meleys and Vhagar was grounded on the  geste of  catcalls of prey.  

“There’s this  lovemaking- fighting ritual that eagles do, where they lock talons and spin, separating before they crash,” explained Einarsson, who said the  occasion director, Alan Taylor, came up with the idea. As with  utmost  goods-heavy filming, the directors used  expansive visual plans to help all involved understand what they were doing in the dragon scenes. “ Storyboards first, ” Condal said.( Einarsson credited the storyboard artist Jane Wu with the upstanding combat’s fluid feeling.)

Also rough animated  performances of the sequences, called previsualizations, are created. This helps the actors as well as the  good  platoon and directors.  “ We can show them a previs of the shot ‘ This is what’s  passing, and this is the  critter that’s coming  by, ’” Einarsson said.“

They can really start to imagine what it is. ”   For flight scenes, the actors sit on moving  equipages that are like enormous mechanical bulls with cameras on them. The perspective of  utmost shots is either “ dragon- mounted ” — on the same dragon as the rider — or “ dragon- to- dragon ” — on an imaginary dragon a short distance down.   also there were the shots that fell into neither  order, like the one of Meleys and Vhagar’s integrated plunge. “ Rules are meant to be broken, ” Einarsson said. terrestrial action  At the center of Dragonstone, House Targaryen’s ancestral home, looms the Dragonmont, a  stormy peak full of coverts and  grottoes  where the  islet’s riderless dragons dwell.

This is where Rhaenyra’s “army of  whoresons ” meets its fiery fate.   For all of its complications, rephotographing dragons in the air is easier than rephotographing them on the ground. Unlike in the completely digital  terrain of the sky scenes, physical sets allow actors and camera drivers to  extemporize in the moment.“ You want to be  suitable to reply to performances, ” Einarsson said. Logistical challenges mount consequently.  

On set, a dragon is represented by “ two puppeteers that have a long broom handle with a big, featherlight dragon head on the front of it, ” Einarsson said. “ That’s for eye- line and any kind of touch commerce — the more intimate  effects. ” Condal said it took months of planning with the  occasion director, Loni Peristere, and others to  produce an enormous new  grotto set to depict the gigantic, ferocious Vermithor laying waste to dozens of would- be dragon- riders. “ That’s how you make this thing big and credible, ” Condal said.   |

“A sequence like this, it becomes an  occasion in and of itself, one that requires its own  product meetings and budget and schedule, ” he said.  Bew, whose character, Hugh, eventually claims Vermithor, said the sequence was both stunning in its complexity and  fairly simple for him to perform.“

We ’re  calculating it like it’s a Cirque du Soleil  cotillion , ” he said. “ Cameras on cables, people moving in the background,  trick guys, people operating the dragon. Rowley( Irlam, the  trick  fellow) is setting fire to people. But technology has moved on so  much that they just edited it together as we went, and the  goods guys have an iPad they can hold up against me, showing me where Vermithor’s going to be. It’s unexpectedly easy. ”