Game of Thrones: Combining CGI and Live Action to Create the Dragons & Fights Scenes in Season 4
Released on 08/04/2014
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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.
Starring: Mike Seymour
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