It's no secret that Game of Thrones goes big when it comes to visual effects, whether it's making a giant dragon or creating the detailed world of Westeros. But in the ten months since we've had a new episode, you may have forgotten just how next-level these guys can get. HBO just dropped a new featurette on the series' VFX to remind us that they're the people who built one of the largest greenscreens in the history of cinema to capture the The Wall in the Battle of Castle Black, and who literally light their stuntmen on fire in order to get the shot.
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"We needed a green screen that was bigger than anything that had ever been built: 30' high and 400' long. I thought, 'There's no way that this is going to happen. I've gone too far,'" says VFX supervisor Joe Bauer in the featurette below. But he hadn't, as HBO began ordering the green screens that day. "The next year I said, 'Now what we need to do is get a flamethrower that shoots 50', strap it to a robotic crane, put it in a bull ring in Spain and hit 20 people with it. What do you think?' And there we were and we did it."
You might think this demonstrates a borderline sociopathic committment the team has to recreating the brutality of Westeros, but VFX producer Steve Kullback backs Bauer up. "When we shoot our firebreathing dragons, we shoot fire," he says. From this footage, it looks like every precaution was taken to ensure these actors' safety, and seeing those guys completely engulfed in flames is part of what makes the show so thrilling. And it's only going to get more so, according to Kullback. He ends the short documentary with a heart-pounding teaser: "The scope and the grandeur of what we're trying to do, and the sheer destruction of it all is much more outrageous in Season 6."Check out some before and after snapshots of our favorite Game of Thrones scenes and the full featurette below.
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