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Hi, I'm Mike Seymour from fxguide.com for Wired.

Near the end of this season of Game of Thrones,

we saw one of the best entrances

and possibly the greatest ever exit

as Daenerys escapes from the grand reopening

of the fighting pits on dragonback.

But just mounting the games and filling the stadium

would've made for a serious set of visual effects shots

with the extensive stadium extensions,

crowd replication, and digital doublework required

when the fighting breaks out.

While there were live-action extras,

there were only about 500 on the day,

although amazingly, 68,000 applied for that job.

The star of the scene is the arrival of Drogon,

who arrives to save the day.

The dragon was designed and built by Pixomondo

and artist, Dan Catcher, but animated here brilliantly

by Rhythm and Hues.

The dragon needed to work with flying and attacking,

but the real challenges were in the detailed work

on the ground.

Here, the team, led by VFX supervisor, Joe Bauer,

needed to provide extreme close-ups,

subtle and moving facial animation,

and careful integration with live-action

with flamethrowers controlled by motion control rigs.

Principal photography was in the Plaza del Toros

in Osuna, Spain with some 200 feet of green-screen

30 foot high, built around the real-world bullring,

although a storm blew that down one night,

and the team had to finish up keying just off the clear,

Spanish blue skies.

What makes the dragon animation so strong

is they build such a detailed skeleton

and underlying muscle system to move realistically

under the skin, and exceptional detail of the dragon's eyes,

which ended up telling a lot of the story

and delivering the subtext of the relationship.

The dragon was pre-animated and agreed upon in previous,

so the camera department could frame-up

on what is essentially an empty frame correctly.

The unfortunate attackers who get killed were a combination

of stuntmen on pull-rigs and CG digi-doubles,

though the real flamethrower did, in fact,

ignite the stuntmen you see being burned to death.

This sequence represented some of the most elaborate

and cinematic visual effects in this season

of HBOs Game of Thrones and will, no doubt,

go down as one of the most loved sequences ever

in this powerhouse series.

Well, don't forget, please subscribe for more

behind-the-scenes action.

I'm Mike Seymour for Wired.

Valad.

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