Steve Kullback: The secret to our success, I think, is that we shoot every element we possibly can shoot. It really lends to the organic nature of it all: whether it’s a dragon diving into the water to go fishing and you drop an anvil into a dumpster full or water painted black at night; or we’re rigging a 50-foot flame thrower to a camera crane on a four-point wire rig on a stage 50 feet off the ground and blasting the floor; or in episode 7 blasting a panel that represents the ice wall.

Joe Bauer: Yeah, that was kind of neat. Even though the nature of the fire in the final episode is a little different for story reasons, in the way it needs to behave, it needs to feel familiar enough that you believe it and don’t write it off as some CG effect. As soon as you do that, then you emotionally disengage from what you’re watching and then it’s no fun anymore. We’re big on that.

“I know fire is certainly something that a lot of vendors have aced and, indeed, for the current season one of our vendors really nailed fire.” —Joe Bauer, Visual Effects Supervisor

VFX Voice: The other big thing about the dragon shots this season has been the very convincing way Daenerys, and now the Night King, is shown riding the dragons. Can you talk about how that is accomplished?

Joe Bauer: The methodology is very much the same as it was in season 5. It involves pre-animating the dragon and in a second step, a technical step, solving the movement that is needed. Really, it’s a dance between the ‘buck’ or gimbal that the actor/actress is sitting on and what the camera’s doing. The heavy lifting can be shared between the two of them. Frequently, the moves are so extreme and so sudden and sometimes so violent, that the actor on the buck is only doing part of it, and the camera’s taking over part of it as well.

It also falls into stunts because as soon as you’ve got an actor – a non-stunt person – doing an unusual physical thing, like riding a bucking bull, it becomes instantly a safety concern. Then the camera is the other half of this, and that’s also on a motion-control rig. The overall effect is distributed between the two. So you feel that the camera is basically static, and the rig that the actress is sitting on, which becomes the dragon, is doing a lot of sort of amazing stuff.