At the risk of mixing medieval metaphors, dragons are a double-edged sword.
For Ryan Condal, co-creator and showrunner of HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” the creatures are key to the show’s magic, both literally and figuratively.
“That’s the only element of fantasy we allowed ourselves,” he said. “In our world, at this time, the magic is in these dragons.”
But they are also death incarnate. “This is all a metaphor, an allegory for nuclear conflict,” Condal said. “You take the city with an army if you want it to stay standing afterwards. You can’t do anything surgical with a dragon.”
The second season of the currently airing “Game of Thrones” prequel has featured more of these magnificent and terrible beasts than any other season in the franchise, including spectacular aerial battles in the fourth episode, “The Red Dragon and the Gold.” Sunday’s episode, “The Red Seed,” in which aspiring dragon riders claim new mounts — or die trying — was more realistic, but it presented the most difficult challenge yet.
In interviews last week, Condal, visual effects supervisor Dadi Einarsson and some of the actors tasked with piloting the creatures on screen explained how they brought it all to life.
The test case
“Season 1 was kind of the proof of concept for the show to come,” Condal said. “We designed Season 1 to be this compelling Shakespearean family drama that would build up to that final act where we would see the first dragon fight.”
In the resulting skirmish in the Season 1 finale, young Prince Lucerys Velaryon and his dragonling, Arrax, are killed by Vhagar, the enormous, centuries-old beast ridden by the one-eyed warrior prince Aemond Targaryen.
“The fight between Vhagar and Arrax is like a rhinoceros versus a house cat,” Condal explains. “But it had the necessary elements: it was a chase, there were two dragons, two actors in the saddle, and everything else was digital. It was a completely virtual sequence, really.”
“If we could do that and convince the public,” he continued, “we could take the intervening year and a half (before Season 2) to do research and development to figure out how to evolve the project.”
Get to know your dragons
Each dragon has its own unique appearance, size, sounds, coloring and personality. Condal and others work with concept designers to define the look of each one. “Weeks and weeks of iterations on that,” he said.
The production had stat sheets for the different dragons, Einarsson said, with details like size, strength, color, behavior and their first rider, back in the show’s prehistory. “All of those things are important for us to be able to sculpt a multidimensional character, something that’s not just a trope or a creature,” he said.
Once the designs are completed, they are handed off to visual effects companies like Weta FX and Rodeo FX to be transformed into the fully articulated, three-dimensional creatures that viewers see on screen.
“One of the main goals of the season was to treat the dragons as characters, not just beasts or means of transportation,” Einarsson said.
The key dragons got a lot more to do in Season 2, and in more vivid detail. Among them were Vhagar and the two beasts she defeated in Episode 4 during the Battle of Rook’s Rest: Meleys, killed along with her rider, Princess Rhaenys; and King Aegon’s Sunfyre, badly wounded but whose fate remains unknown. In the sixth episode, “Smallfolk,” Seasmoke, abandoned by Laenor Velaryon in Season 1, chose his own new rider: Addam of Hull, a humble shipbuilder who is secretly tied to Laenor.
“Dragons are very intelligent creatures,” said Clinton Liberty, who plays Addam. “Seasmoke can sense who the human is behind the façade of who the human is trying to portray.”
In Sunday’s episode, two dragons who have been little-seen and riderless so far in the series take center stage: Silverwing and Vermithor.
“Silverwing was the majestic old dragon of good Queen Alysanne,” Condal said. “I described her as the Britannia, the ship on which Queen Elizabeth made her progress. She certainly didn’t fight. She was the Concorde.”
In Sunday’s episode, Queen Rhaenyra, played by Emma D’Arcy, recruits commoners of noble blood – the illegitimate children of the Targaryen royal family, known as seed dragons – to see if the dragons will accept them as riders, in order to expand her army. Most die in horrific pain, but an unassuming barfly named Ulf claims Silverwing.
“I quickly learned that Silverwing is one of the nicest dragons and, I think, the most beautiful,” said Tom Bennett, who plays Ulf. So his performance is different: “This is the first time we’ve seen someone pilot a dragon laughing.”
Vermithor was something exceptional, said Kieran Bew, who plays a bossy blacksmith named Hugh. The character’s importance, which has been seen throughout the season, is revealed when he claims the hot-tempered dragon.
“We talked about Vermithor being the Bronze Fury, an angry dragon,” he said. “From a performance standpoint, knowing that drives the choices Hugh makes during the claim. You have to make up your own mind.” bigman.”
Filming the fantasy
No one has ever seen real dragons, and there is little precedent for large-scale films and television series featuring realistic dragons, so “House of the Dragon” has few obvious models to draw on.
For the Battle of Rook’s Rest, which featured a conflict between dragons in broad daylight, the team took inspiration from the sky. The camera angles for the aerial combat were inspired by World War II films. The spiraling clash between Meleys and Vhagar was based on the behavior of birds of prey.
“The eagles have this mating combat ritual, where they interlock their talons and circle, separating before they crash,” says Einarsson, who notes that the episode’s director, Alan Taylor, came up with the idea. As with most special-effects shoots, the producers used detailed visual plans to help all the actors understand what they were doing in the dragon scenes. “Storyboards first,” says Condal. (Einarsson credits storyboard artist Jane Wu with making the aerial combat feel fluid.) Then, rough animated versions of the sequences, called pre-visualizations, are created. This helps the actors as well as the special-effects team and directors.
“We can show them a preview of the scene: ‘This is what’s happening and this is the creature that’s coming,’” Einarsson says. “They can really start to imagine what it’s about.”
For the flying scenes, the actors sit on moving platforms that resemble enormous mechanical bulls on which cameras are placed. The perspective of most shots is either “dragon-mounted” (on the same dragon as the rider) or “dragon-to-dragon” (on an imaginary dragon located a short distance away).
There were also shots that didn’t fit into any of those categories, such as Meleys and Vhagar diving together. “Rules are meant to be broken,” Einarsson said.
Land action
At the center of Dragonstone, the ancestral home of House Targaryen, stands Dragonmount, a volcanic peak dotted with tunnels and caverns where the island’s riderless dragons dwell. It is here that Rhaenyra’s “army of bastards” meets its fiery fate.
Despite all the complications, filming dragons in the air is easier than filming them on the ground. Unlike the all-digital environment of aerial scenes, physical sets allow actors and camera operators to improvise on the fly. “You have to be able to react to the performance,” Einarsson says. Logistical challenges pile up accordingly.
On set, a dragon is represented by “two puppeteers who have a long broomstick with a big, light dragon head on the front,” Einarsson said. “That’s for line of sight and any kind of tactile interaction — the most intimate things.” Condal said it took months of planning with the episode’s director, Loni Peristere, and others to create a huge new cavern set to represent the gigantic, ferocious Vermithor devastating dozens of would-be dragon riders. “That’s how you make this thing big and believable,” Condal said.
“A sequence like this becomes an episode in itself, requiring its own production meetings, its own budget and its own schedule,” he said.
Bew, whose character Hugh ultimately claims Vermithor, said the sequence was both astonishing in its complexity and relatively simple for him to pull off.
“We choreographed the whole thing like a Cirque du Soleil dance,” he said. “Cameras on wires, people moving in the background, stuntmen, people handling the dragon. Rowley (Irlam, the stunt coordinator) sets people on fire. But the technology has come so far that they just edit it as they go along, and the special effects guys have an iPad they can hold up to me, showing me where Vermithor is going to be. It’s surprisingly easy.”