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Hi I'm Mike Simmel from FX's guide.com for Wired.

Looking at the character visual effects

in the final episodes of HBO's Game of Thrones.

In the end of series four, fans of the show

were rewarded with some really impressive fights.

Such as the major battle of the wall

between the free folk north of the wall

and the men of night's watch.

It was an excellent chance to see also

the range of character work done

by the visual effects teams.

If you recall, we actually looked before

at the visual effects of Game of Thrones,

the dragon characters.

Of course in series four, the dragons are bigger,

so gone are those stuffed toy reference stand-ins

of previous series.

Now Emilia Clarke is filmed reacting to full sized

molded plastic heads on sticks,

which Pics Armando then replace

with the detailed CG dragons.

Also advanced from earlier seasons

are the implementations of the Whites,

the reanimated undead of the White Walkers.

As Bran Stark and his companions reach the cave

of the Three-Eyed Raven's, they're attacked

by a group of Whites that emerge from the snow

covered ground.

Myra fights them off by actually fighting

a healthy stuntman in a green suit.

For the shoot that lasted four or five days

in the brutal weather outside Belfast,

the production actually asked for the thinnest

stuntman that casting could find.

They then matched CG characters over the top of the motion

of these filmed green screened stuntman.

The Whites couldn't actually be matched perfectly

to these stuntman, not only because of their skeletal form,

but also because the team at scanlined the effects

wanted a sense of rigor mortis, a stiffness added in

because those Whites had actually been dead

and buried in the snow for some time.

Well the series also saw some new characters,

such as at the wall, the massive 700 foot high wall

that stretches from forest fringe mountains in the west

to the bay of seals in the east.

The wall is attacked by the free folk or the Wildlings army,

now complete with giants and woolly mammoths.

These shots required some creative thinking.

The team at MPC had to animate completely

those mammoth walk cycles before anything else

so that the team could then program the motion bases

that the giant sat on to move correctly,

allowing the actors playing the giants

to be composited back on the walking CG mammoths

and still move and sway correctly.

Now, this was made even more complicated

by the fact that the giants had to be shot

with a special scaled motion controlled

green screen system.

This would allow the giants to be scaled up

relative to the normal actors who are playing

the Wildlings of the north that are moving next to them.

And they all had to move correctly in perspective

throughout the shot.

If you scale an element, then you have to reduce

all of it's angles until it's the compensate.

MPC who produced all the attack shots

and used their furtility tool for the mammoth fur

also produced the massive side shot

which dispatches the climbing Wildlings on the wall.

Here, the characters are actually live-action

and the environment and all the effects are added as CG.

Showing that sometimes the best solution to character work

is to actually use real actors whenever possible

and then just add and craft the final shots

by adding in complex CG and effects simulation animation.

Well don't forget, subscribe for more

behind the scenes action.

I'm Mike Simmel for Wired.