House of the Dragon has been so heralded for its intricate character-based plotting and finely-tuned melodrama that its stellar visual effects work can sometimes be overlooked. Often, viewers focus on the minor details that are not up to perfect standards rather than appreciating the effort that went into bringing Westeros to life—and animating 16 dragons along with it. In fact, several companies work together to craft everything from King's Landing to Dragonstone, including MPC Episodic, Outpost VFX, and Pixomondo.
An intense amount of visual effects are required whether a scene involves Caraxes and Seasmoke battling the Crabfeeder's men, such as the Stepstones sequences in House of the Dragon episode 3, or a crowd packed in an interior space, such as the coronation in episode 9. Even the nuances of Viserys' illness and decaying body were achieved through intricate VFX preparation in conjunction with makeup and Paddy Considine's powerful performance. Thanks to the combined efforts of so many people, millions of viewers can dub themselves Blacks or Greens as they witness Alicent and Rhaenyra's friendship descend into war.
Screen Rant spoke to Mike Bell, who is a VFX supervisor for MPC, about how his team collaborated with the House of the Dragon showrunners to turn the clock back on King's Landing and breathe life into several of the show's dragons.
Mike Bell on Dragon Personalities & King's Landing Changes in House of the Dragon
Screen Rant: When MPC was first tasked with working on House of the Dragon, how Herculean of a task was it? How did you start preparing for it?
Mike Bell: Well, initially it's just pure excitement. As a huge fan of what came before in Game of Thrones, the chance to get involved in that world is a real honor. First, it's finding out what our role is and what aspects of it they want us to do; finding out which dragons we're going to be doing. It's obviously it's a shared thing between us and Pixomondo, and that usually determines our sequences, but we had slight crossovers on a couple of occasions.
Being on set and just seeing the scale, you really get a sense of how huge it is. It was bigger that even some film sets, because it had three massive units that would shoot at the same time with these incredible sets that you can just walk through. You can be in the Red Keep, and you feel that realization of, "We'd better not mess this up. This is huge."
Speaking of the dragons, which ones did you work on? What went into the process of deciding what they look like, their respective sizes, and even personalities?
Mike Bell: The dragons that we had were Daemon's dragon, Caraxes, and Meleys, which is Princess Rhaenys' dragon. We did Seasmoke as well, which featured in the Stepstone beach battle. Vermax, which was the young dragon in the training sequence. We had Aegon's dragon, Sunfyre, that actually only featured in one very distant shot. And we shared Syrax for the opening sequence because it featured King's Landing, which was one of our major builds.
But going into the personalities, that was really integral. The lore of the universe that we got from Miguel Sapochnik was that the eggs are placed in the crib when they're born, and they grow with their rider. The idea is that they're like siblings, and they take on elements of each other's personalities. Daemon's Caraxes is slightly dangerous, aggressive, and a little bit untrustworthy—all because Daemon's got a bit of a screw loose and is unpredictable, which is great. Meleys is more matriarchal, older, and has seen battles; even the design of the horns was almost crown-like. For Syrax, the animation we were thinking of was younger and slightly dodging the Red Keep; being a bit more dynamic and playful with the flight.
The client actually gave us these top trump cards, which are like trading cards. They have all these categories of what the dragons are good at and what they're not, and they gave us a description of their personalities and general tactics. Seasmoke, for example, is a bit more stealthy and militant to a degree, like a soldier. We're hoping that we might get them printed off at some point and have a little memento.
But our animation supervisor, Ross Burgess, was really keen on on developing the flight cycles of these dragons, as well as the walk cycles and their attitudes way before we even started working on the shots. The animation team started thinking about even the way they shake their head. Meleys does it the way a lioness would do it, while Caraxes was unique and different from the others. He's much more serpent-like and slightly twitchy; a bit on edge. We take our cues from what came before, and both reptiles and birds are always looking at the horizon for threats. Lots of thought went into the way they move and the way they walked.
Miguel was always saying that Caraxes should not really look like he belongs on the ground, because of the shape. I've got a couple of racing dogs, like lurchers and greyhounds, and he sort of linked them to that. They're amazing when they're in full speed, but when they lay down, they look a bit awkward. They're almost built for a specific thing. In episode one, there's a moment where Daemon's calming Caraxes in the cave, and it's twisted and trying to fit into the cave, but he's feeling like he doesn't like to be confined. He wants to be out there flying, like Daemon.
You also worked on Viserys' face, or lack thereof. Do you know what he was dying of? Is it Westerosi leprosy?
Mike Bell: No, I'd love to tell you exactly what it is. But it's an unknown mystery. Actually, I'd say have a look at Paddy Considine's Instagram, where he says what he thinks it is. He has quite an interesting take on it, and I thought, "Yeah, I'll bind to that."
What went into making his decay look so realistic, especially in episode 8's dinner scene?
Mike Bell: Because of the leap forward in time of six years, they really wanted that first time he appears in bed to be shocking, so you see the deterioration. And what was really important was to preserve Paddy's performance. His performance in episode 8 is so packed with emotion and nuance that you don't want to detract from that in any way. It's tough doing CG faces, or doing anything CG to a face. We're so used to seeing faces that it's very easy for us to pick out what doesn't seem right, and it removes us from the situation. It was very decided very early on that they were definitely keeping his eyes and mouth; anything that could detract. We also use as much as we can of what the makeup department did on the day, with the wounds that he's got on his cheek.
Ultimately, because he's meant to be emaciated and has lost an incredible amount of weight, shrinking him was a simple methodology; just one that's long and drawn out. You're sort of warping and moving him very subtly, then layering it. Also, you're color grading sections to give it contouring and make his cheekbones feel prominent, and tracking minute bits in. Beyond that, when he takes the mask off, that was a 3D build put onto the thinner, more gaunt version of King Viserys. It's a combination of 2D tracking methods and 3D for the actual hole in the wound in his eye and the missing cheek. Because, obviously, you needed to see inside at that point. You needed to see all the muscles and teeth.
The team did a great job with that. It was horrifying but not distracting.
Mike Bell: I find on some things, like when people are making actors look younger, it can throw you off. If it's a recognizable actor, you instantly go, "Oh, some VFX is happening now." It removes you from the story slightly. Whereas this one, it could be mistaken that he went full Christian Bale. I don't think it detracted from the scenes at all. And certainly, that episode was packed with emotion, and I think Paddy's look just enhanced it.
What is so interesting about House of the Dragon is that so many of these locations and environments came from Game of Thrones, but we're now generations removed from it. How do you make that shift of nearly 200 years while maintaining the recognizable locations?
Mike Bell: A huge asset of ours was King's Landing. We had a full CG, fully recognized King's Landing with all its encompassing buildings. The Red Keep, the Dragonpit, the Grand Sept, and the new tourney ground. In prior seasons of Game of Thrones, they tended to use digital matte painting, where you photoshop things and you track it in. They did a great job, and it really worked.
But what we wanted to do here was have a full CG thing King's Landing, so we could pretty much put a camera anywhere and have an establishing shot from this or that angle. We weren't tied into original footage, which also meant that we could place cameras within actual rooms in the Red Keep and go, "This is what the view from the king's apartment should be. This is exactly what he would be seeing," or, "This is what the small council should be." Of course, for cinematic purposes, you move things around and make it look pretty. If it's a boring view, you make it look nice and make it look better. But the thinking was that we could then do shots like the opening sequence, where Syrax flies over King's Landing, which you wouldn't have necessarily been able to do before.
King's Landing itself was less built up and not quite as big. It's still huge, but it doesn't stretch out quite so far. The buildings should not be quite so high; they're going to be a bit lower. Initially, it was no more than two stories—maybe on some occasions, three stories high. Obviously, the Dragonpit was a ruin in Game of Thrones, but it was now a fully-formed and usable building. As far as the city, we were actually dressing all the streets with market stalls and ladders and props, as well as CG people just walking around. Because it was a younger city and not necessarily as developed with cobbled streets, Miguel wanted it to be dirtier and dustier. Every view had a layer of dust and smoke flying around.
There are maps of what the city looks like, in terms of where certain districts and demographics live, so we really worked on that as well. The Red Keep is surrounded by the houses of the people that work there, so they should be nicer than the people in Flea Bottom, which is more of a slum. Then the houses around the Dragonpit tend to be the dragon keepers, so they're more working class. But the roads and areas are all the same, because if you see views of a city street now versus 100 years ago, everything's placed the same but just slightly different. The thinking was, "How would this have looked before it was developed?"
Of all the sequences you worked on, which would you say was the most complicated or nuanced?
Mike Bell: I think the most nuanced was probably the King Viserys stuff, which required a lot more fine-tuning. In terms of complexity, we did both of the battles in episode 3, so the Bloodstone beach battle opening at nighttime, and then the daytime one. Just in terms of the number of layers and elements that went into the scenes, because the environment wasn't real, even down to the cliffs. It was all shot on the backlot at Leavesden, and it was a much smaller section that was redressed every day further down the beach. It felt longer than it was.
The nighttime battle where Caraxes lands on the beach is pretty much full CG, apart from the opening. We might have placed an element of Daemon on top of the dragon, or a couple of foreground archers firing, but everything beyond that was full CG. Which is really interesting, because you build this environment and get it looking great, and then you decide it's all going to be in shadow. You're not gonna see any of it. [Laughs] But it's great, because what happens is that the fire from the dragon lights up the environment. And you know it's there, because you've just seen it in glimpses. That episode was very complicated, with a lot of shots and animation. It also had a lot of effects simulation, with dust and dirt flying around; sand and debris; fire arrows and that kind of stuff.
Actually, both the interior Dragon pit shots during the coronation in episode 9 were really challenging. Those whole sequences were shot on a 360-degree blue screen. There's no environment; there's no crowd. There's maybe 40 people close by, but the crowd going off into the distance was a full CG crowd. If you see the before and afters on those, it's kind of like, "Here's everything." It's just shooting on a blue screen, which means that every single shot in those sequences is a visual effects shot. The scope of work on those ones is huge, because you don't realize what is real and what's not, and there's no building at all.
Even the jousting tournament in episode 1 is mostly CG. There's maybe the royal box and one tier of a crowd, but everything else is CG. You said, "Give me one thing," and I've basically said everything.
Does that mean you know how many people were crushed by Rhaenys and Meleys in episode 9?
Mike Bell: That's quite interesting, because [the coronation in episode 9] was changed a little bit. Especially when Rhaenys exits, because we initially had shots where she exits and plows through thousands of people. And it was just like, "Well, that's not really into the feeling of the character."
There's definitely a feeling like, "Is it okay that she's just going through all this crowd?" We went high and then reduced it down. But n all that dust, there's also people flying and somersaulting. I think if you paused it, you might be able to count them. It's hundreds, maybe thousands.
How early do you begin working on season 2? Filming is a long way out, but when does your planning begin?
Mike Bell: I haven't read any scripts or heard any talk of what might be involved, apart from a few brief chats on set of, "I hear this might be happening next time." Obviously, I can't say what, but there's no work on it at the moment.
They're still writing it, we were already starting the build on the dragons in June or July of last year for season 1. So, overall, it's between a year and 18 months from start to finish. The build on the dragons started very early, because they're very important and had to have multiple iterations. You start with concept art and build from there, and that's a very long process. We were still building those at the start of this year.
I hope you get to do more with Seasmoke next season, even though Laenor isn't around.
Mike Bell: In the last episode, there was talk about unclaimed dragons, but also dragons that currently don't have riders. A bit like what happened with Vhagar; they sit on their own until they find a new rider. I really hope Seasmoke finds one, because the look of it is actually one of my favorites. Hopefully, they'll find a new rider.
About House of the Dragon
House of the Dragon, the eagerly awaited prequel to Game of Thrones, is based on George R. R. Martin’s Fire & Blood. Set some 200 years before the events that unfolded in Game of Thrones, this is the remarkable, turbulent story of the House of Targaryen.
Check out our other House of the Dragon interviews here:
- Paddy Considine
- Matt Smith & Fabien Frankel
- Emma D'Arcy & Olivia Cooke
- Milly Alcock & Emily Carey
- Steve Toussaint & Eve Best
- Ryan Condal & Miguel Sapochnik
House of the Dragon season 1 is currently available to stream on HBO Max.